The Blackberry Crazies
by scumblackentropy
Summary: She had buttermilk-pale skin. The exhaustion was plain as pumpkin juice on her face. Her hair was lit from behind by the paling window, the red filaments mixed in with the brown flaring to life. She lurked in my periphery just like that—improbably, infuriatingly—and I could have sworn she was divine if I wasn't so sure she was a Mudblood.
1. Chapter 1

**Week 1**

"What happened on the night of the 27th of December of last year?"

"_Fuck_ you."

Scritch-scratch-scritch-scratch.

"I… I'm sorry. Come off it, Healer Wallace, you don't have to write that down. There was an… an accident, I think. I can't remember. It was dark. It was a long time ago."

There was a squeaking, choking sound. I realised that it was coming from me; I was digging my fingertips into the armrests, the sweat on my palms slicking against leather. I wondered if I had the strength to squeeze right through the upholstery and the wooden frame and whatever else goes into expensive, antique armchairs. I'd go about it systematically. Start with the armrests, then that oppressive-looking desk, the potted plant, the tapestry. That _fucking_ clock that won't stop ticking. I'd watch the blood rise under the skin of his whey-coloured, jowl-heavy face as I ground his pretentious furniture into dust with my fists. Then I'd pay for all of it. How much for this chair, Wallace my boy? Three-hundred Galleons? How much for your dignity? I'll take the lot. Keep the fucking change, you cunt-starved sycophant.

One by one, I made my fingers relax.

"That's quite alright. Can you tell me what you do remember?"

(Wind whistling smug-faced through a forest of blue-black trees. An aftertaste of orange hysteria.)

"There was a tree. One tree, right outside my bedroom window."

"I understand, Mister Malfoy. And was it an ugly tree?"

(It looked like death grown over with bark.)

"Sorry?"

"What I mean to say is, did the tree arouse any particular feelings of repulsion, or disgust, any negative sentiments or associations at all? Did you think about this tree often?"

Healer Wallace was an old-ish man of tremendous gravitas. I bet he used that word on a daily basis too, gravitas. He knew my father, and apparently thought that this association granted him the right to nod condescendingly at my answers to his absurd questions. I put up with it because I had to, and they would put me back here for good if I didn't pass the evaluations, but something about this bastard's eyes rubbed me the wrong way. They were too shiny. Chillingly reflective, almost in a duplicitous way. Like the mirror image of a mirror image of a mask. Like looking outside through the window, and the window is clean and so perfectly clear, but the awareness of cold glass is ever-present and impossible to shake.

"—Goyle like trees too?"

"What?"

"Did your friend Mister Goyle like trees?"

(I just want to take my life and pack it up and bring it with me in a box. That's what Goyle said. Goyle in a box. Goyle in a box.)

"What _the fuck_ does that have to do with anything?"

"Alright, then." Healer Wallace made a point of scribbling in his fancy clipboard. It was a test, I just knew it. The wanker was deliberately provoking me with the scratch of quill on parchment. Well, he'd be glad to know that I didn't do violent outbursts anymore. _Psychotic breakdowns are so last season_, a voice that sounded remarkably like Pansy's simpered in my head. I sucked my tongue off the back of my teeth and counted to ten in my head. I tried not to think about trees.

* * *

**Week 4**

"_Malfoy_."

Enter Granger, stage right.

She spat my name as if it were the basest of imprecations. I gave her the customary disparaging once-over, settling in certain areas just long enough to convey the impression of vaguely interested disgust. Like a glance you might give roadkill.

"Granger," I sneered.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"I don't have to answer you."

She furrowed her brow but otherwise seemed to accept the fact that she did not own the waiting room and that I had just as much right to an imperfect constitution as she did. Granger huffed and tutted and garrumphed her way to the seat furthest away from me. She settled herself in her seat like a drunk, or like a convict, limp-lipped and loose-limbed, just filling in space for the time being.

Sorry, did you need this chair? I'm terribly sorry, but I have to sit in this chair now, and I do hope you'll forgive me for taking up this much oxygen.

I'd heard rumours about her husband, and I admit I may have been hoping to run into her here, if only to rub Weasley's comatose in her face. And it did feel good, for the first ten seconds of our encounter. Calamity Granger all snuffed out, all her joists and beams and all those little fiddly parts that once held her spine so self-righteously erect now rusted, too big for their sockets. I could almost hear the metal rattling around inside her as she moved. Everything about her screamed burnout! Burnout! Burnout!

And then, like she felt my contempt all the way across the room, she dragged her sorry head up and met me right in the eye.

(Burn, burn, burn, burn, burn.)

Something in her eyes—the steely shock in them, maybe, or the way she looked as though she'd just missed out on the final slices of sunlight to be had in the world—made me look away.

We ignored each other for the next hour until she was called. Her presence buzzed in the back of my mind like static.

* * *

**Week 6**

"What happened on the night of the 27th of December of last year?"

I'd learned that it was easier for everyone if I just went along with the questions.

"Someone got hurt. In a forest, I think. There was a forest with gigantic trees."

"What do the trees look like?"

"I don't bloody know, do I?"

"Well, let's start with something simpler." Healer Wallace bestowed me with a paternalistic smile. I wanted to feel his front teeth breaking the skin across my knuckles. I wanted to bury my thumbs in his eye sockets and feel for his brains. How do you like it now, Wallace my boy? Doesn't feel so good when it's someone else's meddling fucking fingers in your mind, does it?

"Why don't you tell me how many trees there were?"

(Too many. Too many.)

"A lot, I suppose."

Scritch-scratch-scritch-scratch.

"Good, good. Would you say they were in the dozens? Or perhaps hundreds? Maybe in thou—"

"They blocked out the light. That's how many there were," I snapped. I felt drawn and tense, as if all my tendons tightened against my bones without my permission. "And they smelled…"

"Yes?"

"It's daft. It's not important."

"Mister Malfoy, every detail counts if you want me to help you. Please let me help you. Do you want me to help you?"

I bit down so hard I thought I might break my skull. Then, slowly, I nodded. I hated myself for it.

"Now, what did the trees smell like?"

My tongue was welded to the roof of my mouth. "Like… fire. Sulphur and brimstone. Like the burnt outer edge of an old iron cauldron. Have you heard of… of bombs?"

Scritch-scratch-scritch-scratch.

"Yes, I have. Do you mean Muggle explosive devices? There are quite a large variety of them. Can you tell me about them?"

I stared at him hard, trying to catch him in the act of mocking me. I wanted him to flinch under my gaze, but he just sat there.

"I don't know why I brought it up. It's a terrible comparison."

"Tell me about the bombs, Mister Malfoy."

I heaved a sigh. I wasn't about to let him think that—though I was obliged to participate in his cute little entry level, pop-psychology quiz sessions—I was having a good time. "Well, you know the biggest ones? The atom bombs? There's the initial blast, which is bad enough, but there's also radiation. I don't quite understand radiation. It seems to be some sort of unconfined, left-over energy that fries your cells and they accelerate and accumulate at an alarming rate until…"

"Until?"

"Until… Until your shell explodes…" It came out as a whisper. I cleared my throat. "Anyway, like I said, it doesn't have to do with much. I just get the sense of an explosion happening nearby. It's always hot and dry and… scratchy."

I rubbed at the skin of my arms. They always itched during these sessions.

"This is good progress, Mister Malfoy, very good progress."

"Yeah, alright. Whatever. Can I leave now?"

* * *

**Week 10**

"Finally gone round the bend, have you?" I asked her. I couldn't help it. The room was too white and my options were either to jump out the window, or talk to Granger.

"No," she said through her nose. Such a prim little bitch, she was.

"Then why are you here?"

I knew exactly why she was here, of course. They said Weasley came out of the war just fine, better than the rest of their jolly bunch, in fact. He and Granger got hitched, and then, without warning, he fell into convulsions while chatting with some poor, unsuspecting Ministry clerk or other. I heard he lost a tooth when he banged his face against a desk as he went down. It's not that I was following their story closely or anything, it's just, with them being who they were and all, it was impossible to remain unaware. Potter used to come with her in the beginning, but he stopped visiting. Granger continued to come, regular as clockwork. Sometimes she brought a book. Sometimes flowers.

"You know why I'm here, you stupid fuck," she whispered vehemently, hunching her shoulders.

Her response was far more intense than I was hoping for. All I wanted was a bit of harmless sparring, but there she went and got all defensive and disproportionately hurt, ruining the whole thing for me. I had to admit though, I was a little impressed. Impressed isn't quite the right word. Maybe... relieved? Something about watching her mope around all dressed down like a wet firecracker—all shaken out and rubbed raw—made me think of great causes, and how everyone always forgot about them in the end.

I'll have whatever Live Wire Granger over here is having, bartender. Get me a fix of some of that vicious hypnosis.

(Fish in a bowl, Goyle used to say. We're all just fish in a bowl.)

Still, I had no idea what to say to her. Without our roles of Pureblood and Mudblood, we were just two people in a boring-as-fuck waiting room in St. Mungo's. I almost asked her: How's that coma going for Weasley? But I was tired, and I just wanted the day to be over. The seat was perfectly formed for my body shape. I thought I might fall asleep here forever. I wouldn't have minded.

"Are _you_ crazy, Malfoy?"

I opened one eye in surprise. She was looking at my arms, and I looked down to find myself rubbing at them unconsciously. I stopped.

I don't know why I said what I did next. I wasn't trying to be funny. I didn't want to see her laugh.

"There is a fifty-fifty chance that I may or may not be clinically insane at any given point in time. Unless you put me in a box with a cat, then I am simultaneously crazy and not crazy."

Her lips twitched. "That's not how Schrodinger's cat works, though I wouldn't expect you to know anything about quantum mechanics."

My face felt suddenly warm like it was too close to a flame, and it pissed me off. "Fuck you, Granger."

* * *

**Week 11**

"What happened on the night of the 27th of December of last year?"

"I'm _not_ crazy."

"No, of course you aren't."

"Don't... Don't _say_ it like that, like..."

"Like what, Mister Malfoy?"

"Like what? _Like what_? You bloody know _like what_, you condescending, pompous prick."

"My dear boy—"

"Don't fucking call me that!"

"—aren't crazy. You are simply—"

"Say it!"

"I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I don't follo—"

"Fucking _say_ I'm not crazy! Don't—don't patronize me, just say it. Just say it like you mean it."

"You are not crazy."

"Say it! Say it or I'm never coming back to this fucking place! Say it or I'll—I'll burn your bloody office down!"

"You are not crazy."

"I'm not, am I?'

"You are not crazy."

"I'm not."

"You are not crazy."

"_Please_..."

"You are not crazy."

"That's not good enough."

"I'm sorry, Mister Malfoy. It's all I have for you."

"I... Yeah, yeah alright. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have... I'm sorry."

"Would you like to end this session a little early?"

"No. No, I'm fine. What was your question?"

"What happened on the night of the 27th of December of last year?"

"I don't know. There were trees. There was fire. I don't know."

* * *

**Week 13**

Mother had been opposed to my moving out of the Manor. She'd convinced Father to offer me a wing of my own to entice me into staying. I didn't particularly want to leave, but it seemed that all the windows of the East Wing looked out into the forest that bordered our property. I didn't like looking at the trees. Mother said that we could black out all the windows, but that wouldn't really have helped much.

I was certain that Mother had Dooley come over to my new flat whenever I'm not in to restock the cupboards. I kept finding little tidbits of my childhood insinuating their way into my life. First it was a framed photo of the three of us that I had no recollection of bringing with me when I moved out. Then it was the duvet I've used since I was five. A pair of old bedroom slippers that haven't fit me since puberty. A miniature broomstick, the one with the crook in the handle. A chipped coffee mug that I kept my quills in. It wasn't Mother's style, so I assumed it was Dooley acting all on her own. I let her do it. It was easier for me if both Dooley and Mother convinced themselves that I was being taken care of.

The point of all this being that my flat was nothing much more than four bare walls built around a vacuum of inertia, a few mementos, and a single bed. There was a fireplace hitched up to the Floo network, and sometimes when I was feeling particularly self-loathing, I would light it up and think of how eight of them could fit in any single fireplace in the Manor. It was a nice practice—somewhat cathartic—but I didn't do it often. There wasn't much else to do at my flat, and much as I loathed Wallace's quivering jowls, I usually arrived here a bit early.

The thing was, there wasn't much to do in the waiting room either.

I leaned against my chair, resting the back of my neck against the hard edge of the seat. The room was too white. It burned into the back of my eyeballs, and I couldn't help but blink in an attempt to flush the naked blaze of it searing into my retinas. Granger was here too, her nose determinedly stuck in a copy of the Daily Prophet. She was trying not to look at me, I could tell. I shut my eyes and opened them, shut and open, shut and open, trying to catch Granger in the act of sneaking a peek.

There was a poem I heard once. Something, something, shut my eyes and the world drops dead. Something, something, I lift my lids and all is born again.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

It was a funny poem, not in the funny ha-ha way, but funny in the way that I don't know what the hell it's talking about, and yet I feel as if it's completely appropriate for the situation. A jagged edge of light curved through the glass of the window—like a crack yawning in the atmosphere, or a fraying hole into another dimension—and it hit my eye at just the right angle that, every time I blinked, it was like squinting through the flickering haze of a bonfire. The world dissolved and reborn in a waiting-room bonfire.

I thought of light and heat and phosphorescence. Of how something can be so hot that it starts to emit a radioactive glow, like the aftermath of an atom bomb. Of dry heaving desperation and the sensation of your insides turning slowly into powder. Too-tight skin and aching bones and heat, heat, heat. The smell of burning leaves (or was it hair?).

Something, something, shut my eyes. World drop dead. Something. Something. Born again. How did it go?

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The light refracted like a shard of pure malevolence and suddenly the white room was gone, and it was all shadow everywhere. The shadows were leaves, and the chairs were trees, and my skin was calcifying into bark all over and it was impossible to bend my joints. Smoke coming out of my pores.

(Goyle in a box. Goyle in a box. Goyle in a burning orange box.)

"You smell like blackberries."

The forest was gone. I shook my head.

It was the way Granger said it—like I'd somehow insulted her deeply with my scent—that got my attention. And anyway I've never been told that I smell like anything before, much less blackberries.

"You wanna make something of it?" I retorted. It wasn't my best, but I spent all of last night rearranging what little furniture I had and my eyeballs felt like they were coated in sand, so I gave myself a free pass.

She frowned. There was a small crinkle in the center of her forehead that stretched and folded at the movement. Then I had a funny thought. I thought: this is how it starts. Little dry papery folds here and there that criss-cross their way across your face. You don't notice them at first. They take advantage of your leniency and pretend like they aren't there to stay, that they're only sleeping over for the night because they're in town and your face was so conveniently spacious. You weren't using all that extra skin anyway, were you? And your eyes have just the right amount of sheen and your cheeks so blank and empty so they invite their corrugated cousins and their pleated pals and before you know it your face is rumpled and puckered and tucked and you've forgot how to smile. Then it spreads out until it eats you, and you are just one big wrinkle. One big, sad wrinkle in the fabric of space and time.

"—ust odd, that's all." Her voice was one of the most recognizable parts of her.

"Huh?"

"I _said_, it's odd that you smell like blackberries."

I can smell like whatever I fucking please, you stupid girl. I would have said it too, if she'd given me enough time to react. Instead I opened my mouth and closed it, then moved my lips around as if I did not know how to shape them to form vitriol anymore. Granger had small hands.

"Oh. Yes."

She looked at me strangely, but before she could get her words out the Mediwitch called her name and she was gone in a flurry of robes and hair and angly elbows and the faint lingering bitterness of fresh newsprint and post-war ennui.

* * *

**Week 15**

"Do you like poetry, Mister Malfoy?"

"I'm not paying you two hundred Galleons an hour to sit here and listen to you bombard me with asinine questions."

"I'm sure you're not, as I seem to recall that it was your father's signature on the check, and not yours."

"Good on you, Wallace. As long as we both acknowledge it."

"Well, do you?"

"Do I what?"

"Mister Malfoy, we can go back to talking about the 27th of December, or you can answer my question."

"I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens, only that something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses. Nobody, not even in the rain, has such small hands."

"That was lovely, very lovely, thank you. Was that... hmm, let me see... Dickinson?"

"Cummings, actually."

"Of course, pardon me. Cummings, yes, such a talented fellow. A shame, really."

"What's a shame?"

"That he's dead."

"Oh."

"Have you heard of this passage, Mister Malfoy?"

"When the fierce soul has quit the fleshly case  
It tore itself from, Minos sends it down  
To the seventh depth. It falls to this wooded place—"

"No, never heard of it."

"Then perhaps these next lines will jog your memory.

No chosen spot, but where fortune flings it in—  
And there it sprouts like a grain of spelt, to shoot  
Up to a sapling, then a wild plant: and then

The Harpies, feeding on the foliage, create  
Pain, and an outlet for the pain as well.  
We too shall come like the rest, each one to get

His cast-off body, but not for us to dwell  
Within again: for justice must forbid  
Having what one has robbed oneself of—still,

Here we shall drag them; and through the mournful wood  
Our bodies will be hung, with every one  
Fixed on the thornbush of its wounding shade."

"I don't... I don't... I've never..."

"It's the thirteenth canto of Dante's Inferno, Mister Malfoy. The wood of the suicides."

(I just want to take my life and pack it up and bring it with me in a box. That's what Goyle said.)

"That's not... What does that have to do with anything? That's not what happened."

"What happened on the night of the 27th of December of last year?"

"Shut up. Shut up. Shut up."

"Mister Malfoy, what happened to your friend, Gregory Goyle, on the night of the 27th of December?"

"He didn't—he'd never have done... _that_. Goyle is alright. He's fine. He's a bloody idiot, but he's alrigh—"

"At the time this was written, suicide was considered by the Muggle Christian Church as at least equivalent to murder. Have you heard of the Ten Commandments, Mister Malfoy? Of course you have."

"Goyle wouldn't... You're lying..."

(Fish in a bloody bowl. Instinct wrapped in impotent flesh. Smoke and coloured water. Where's that vicious hypnosis I asked for, bartender?)

"Which of the Ten Commandments would you say stands out the most? Personally, I always think of 'Thou shalt not kill.' You see, many theologians believed suicide to be a deeper sin than murder, as it constituted a rejection of God's gift of life."

"I need... water. I'm thirsty. I'm so thirsty. Shut up. _Please_. Shut up."

"Dante punishes the act of suicide by encasing the offender in a tree, thus denying eternal life and damning the soul to an eternity as a member of the restless living dead, and prey to the harpies."

(I've heard of a bomb, of radiation, of cells bursting outwards forever and ever.)

"Goyle got hurt, but he wasn't like that. You don't understand. This type of... existential despair isn't Goyle's style. He's a simple bloke. No harpies and damnation for him."

"What happened on the night of the 27th of December of last year?"

"I don't... I can't... Do _you_ know, Wallace? Why don't you just tell me yourself?"

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Mister Malfoy. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. You've made yourself forget, and so you are ill. My job is to help you create a new way to remember."

* * *

**Week 18**

"Do you want to hear a secret?"

She had a talent for saying things in ways that were horrendously inappropriate for what she was actually saying. For example, this time she said it casually, like it was her habit to spew out her soul's innermost workings to unsuspecting strangers like me. Well, I suppose we weren't strangers, but that wasn't the point.

"Why are you talking to me?" I snapped.

"Because there is no one else to talk to, and I am sick of this book." She held up the cover. It was the blandest shade of yellow I've ever seen, but I was of the don't-judge-by-a-cover school of thought.

Who was I kidding? I judged things left and right.

"Well, do you?"

"Do I what?"

"Want to hear the secret," she said slowly, as if she were talking to a child. "Try to keep up, Malfoy."

"Not particularly, Granger, but thanks anyway."

She gave me that same crinkly frown. "You already know I'm going to tell you anyway. It's inevitable."

(Blood and foam. That's what we are. Snape told me so.)

"Only death is inevitable," I said solemnly, trying for some sort of Snape impression. It was terrible, not only because the man was dead, but also because I was never good with impressions.

She laughed. Again, I wasn't trying to make her laugh, but it wasn't an unwelcome sound. And then I laughed too, not as loudly or as obviously as she did, because she was looking at me so expectantly that I felt almost obligated to join in. I sort of just huffed in amusement. I'd meant for it to come out as some grand, nihilistic proclamation and make her shut up, but even I could tell how bloody stupid I sounded just then.

(We're all dead in the long run. In the end we're dirt. Our whole civilization is a layer of sediment. How's that for a secret?)

She stopped laughing and looked at me. She was skinny, but I suppose we all were. It was a symptom of our generation. War as we knew it was obsolete, and it left behind it a bunch of jittery, half-awake, underfed twenty-somethings cracking lame jokes in crazy wards.

"You're funny, Malfoy, but not in the way that you think."

(Wanna make a bet, Granger?)

"Thanks, I guess."

She looked away and put her nose back into her banal book. I tried to scan the title, but she was sitting too far away from me and I decided I didn't care that much. I tapped my foot. The Welcome Witch gave me a bracing look and I tapped harder.

What's your secret, Granger? I wanted to say, only I didn't want to look too eager because after all, we weren't friends. We were just two people who happened to be in the same place at the same time at four in the afternoon every Saturday. And anyway the atmosphere wasn't right for secret-telling. It was too bright, for one thing, and the air smelled of antiseptic, and cold, reflective surfaces, and too much white. It smelled white.

Secrets were meant to be shared under an unbreakable mantle of darkness, perhaps in a ditch somewhere. Or under a mattress. Or that spot at the base of your spine. Or between the walls, plaster dust caking your throat. Or high up in a tower, with an old man about to die and you didn't really want him to die—_please don't die_—but he has to die anyway because He said so. Or in a forest with moaning trees that bled black out of their broken limbs, with heat and the smell of burning hair, and your jaw is clenched so hard you think you might shatter your skull and the shards of it will be embedded in your brain so deep you can _taste_ it, and your heart is somewhere far away, the pace running away from you, and your friend in a blaze of orange plucking life like a yellowed page out of an old book (What are you doing, Goyle?) and how did this wand—how _the fuck_ did this wand get in my hand—

"—anger, Hermione." The Mediwitch's voice was pleasantly tinny, like an attractive woman's voice heard from the other room, except the Mediwitch was right in front of me and wasn't attractive at all. I liked her, though. She gave me a nod as she saw me.

Granger stood. "See you later, Malfoy," she said as she passed me, her small hands clasped at her back.

(I'll take you anywhere you want, Granger.)

"Hmm," I replied. I never actually saw her after she was called, as I was usually called right after she was.

It was Granger, Hermione.

And then Jones, Mallory.

And then Jackman, Wayne.

And then Malfoy, Draco.

(_How did this wand get in my—in my—_)

Jones was a middle aged man who was on some sort of juice-fast, judging by the plastic container of green glop he carried around with him and the way he lovingly eyed the sandwich I brought with me last week. Jackman was a weedy boy perhaps a few years older than me who had the air of an eager anarchist who fell into bad times, like live wire wrapped in a wet blanket. I didn't know exactly how I could tell. It must have been the way the tips of his ears were always red, or how he always held his fists clenched in his lap.

(_This wand—wand—wand—_)

We were all nutters, I suppose, so I had no right to judge. But I knew I'd judge the lot of them anyway.

* * *

**Week 20**

"What happened on the night of the 27th of December of last year?" I said, cutting Wallace off before he'd even got the chance to open his mouth.

"Why... yes. Good. Why don't you tell me what happened?"

"Goyle got hurt, didn't he?"

"Yes, he did."

"Is he... Is he going to be alright?"

"Mister Malfoy, your friend Gregory Goyle has been dead for over a year."

I cleared my throat and flexed my back against my seat. "Yes, of course. Goyle died. He is dead. That's what I meant."

"Do you need to take a moment?"

"No, no, I'm alright. Is... Crabbe's dead too, right?"

Scritch-scratch-scritch-scratch.

"Vincent Crabbe died during the war, well before Mister Goyle did. I am sorry for your loss. I understand you were great friends."

"No, I... I mean, yeah, we were friends. I think they both hated my guts. Anyway, never mind that. I just wanted to make sure I haven't got things mixed up." I ran my tongue under the rim of my front teeth. Wallace peered up at me from over his spectacles.

"Do you remember how he died, Mister Malfoy? Mister Goyle, that is."

(You see all that orange? The sun's ecstatic to be ending the day. I'm tired too, Draco.)

"It was... sunset. In the Manor Grounds. I... I've never seen petrol, but I knew what it tasted like, on that day."

"How did he die, Draco?"

(I am the heir to white gold decay, Draco.)

"He just... _died_." Funny how one little syllable—_duh—aye—uhd—duh—_could take so much effort to force out through my teeth. They caught on a lump swelling in my throat. I looked down at my arms to find them shimmering. I was hot and dry and high, like a bedraggled kite caught up in the gust of a heat haze. Incandescent. One step—and into the chasm I go. One movement—and the cusp crumbles. How I'd love for it to crumble. It'd be the highlight of my shit day, my shit week, my shit year. Sweat dripped down between my shoulderblades, and the sound of silver rang through my head.

I thought to myself: Here it comes.

I waited for the cold spatter of oblivion across my vision.

"It's alright, Mister Malfoy. Do you need a moment?"

(We'll never get away, Draco. And even if we could—even if we could—)

"No, no, just... water. Please. Could I have some water?"

I imagined a pocket of empty colour. Flickering festoons of run-for-your-life orange and delirious green and supernova blue licking sinuously at each other in a forgotten corner of space and time. That was me. I was a rumbling riot of existence. I was a fissure of broken flames. I was a cavity gorged into the universe, crammed into a fleshy cage, and named after a northern constellation that was too far away to have anything in common with me. Draco Malfoy, the black hole.

How do you like me now, Wallace? I'll suck all your ugly furniture and your toupe and your fucking clipboard into my gravity. And then where will you be? Where will you be without your scritchy-scratchy clipboard, Wallace?

(We'd just fall asleep. We'd fall asleep by the fire, Draco. And we. Will. Burn.)

"Take a moment, dear boy." Wallace Charmed a glass of water into my waiting hand. I hefted the weight of it, taking comfort in the drip of condensation into the grooves of my knuckles. "We'll work through this."

(Hang me up to dry, Draco.)

I felt calmly detached. The water was soothing in my throat. I imagined it flowing down, down, down, ever downhill, through my pores and bleeding out into a puddle beneath me. I imagined my skin turning translucent and melting with it. In the background, Wallace was yammering on about how this was all 'very impressive progress' and how I was on my way to 'complete recovery' soon. It was strange. I thought this moment would be more violent, but I suppose I hadn't quite hit the wall yet. The water brought me back. I took another sip and felt the beat of my heart slow down.

"Are you alright, Mister Malfoy?"

(Floo me when you get this, Draco.)

"Yeah. Yeah. I'm fine. I'm sorry about that. It's just... It's unbelievably hot in here. What was your next question?"

* * *

**Week 22**

"Oh, can I tell you a joke?"

Granger seemed to think that having to see each other once a week for the past five months made us best buddies or some such bullshit. I supposed it was marginally better than her acting so twitchy around me, like I was continuously plotting her demise. I'd never noticed before, but I realised that—for someone so booksmart—Granger was oddly childish in some aspects. A person had either her affection or her contempt. She was very rarely neutral, always insisting on taking a side even with the most insignificant, most hopeless of matters.

I guess I was struck by it because it's a rare thing, looking at the world through her eyes, and I didn't know how to feel about the fact that she'd categorized me with the things she didn't hate.

Surprisingly, her delivery wasn't too discordant this time. She turned to me, an eager tilt to her mouth, and I could just tell that she'd been waiting all week to tell me. It was rather sweet.

"No."

"Well, a bloke walks into a bar and sees a horse tending, apron and all, wiping out a glass."

"Please shut up." I wasn't sure if she was _supposed_ to be joking at a time like this. You'd think that Hermione Granger of all people would be the one upholding the sanctity of the no-joking policy of St. Mungo's waiting rooms.

"So the guy stares at the horse for a few minutes without saying a word, completely shocked. The horse returns the stare and breaks the silence by asking, 'Hey mate, what's the matter? You can't believe that a horse can tend bar?' And you know what the guy says?"

Granger was the sort of person who could not pronounce a single word without an accompanying gesture. I tried not to stare at her hands, and so looked down at mine instead. They felt like they were encased in old bandages. "He says: my children are dead and my wife just left me. I don't care what species you are, just help me get shitfaced."

"_Jesus_, Malfoy," she scoffed incredulously. Five seats down to my right, Jackman, Wayne snorted. Granger arched an eyebrow at him before turning back to me. "_Anyway_, that's not what he says. The guy says, 'No, I just can't believe that the ferret sold the place."

She was sitting two seats away from me and giggling to herself. She was wearing blue, her hair piled in a frizzy bun on the top of her head, making it look disproportionately large. She looked good in blue. Her hand was resting on the seat next to her and I had a funny thought: this was the closest I'd been to her since the war.

"It's not catching, you know," I blurted out to my hands. "My crazy. It's not catching."

I immediately regretted what I said. I didn't want her to think I was _opening up_. I didn't want her to sit next to me. I didn't want any part of her stupid fucking jokes.

"Yes, I know. But mine might be." I looked up too quickly and everything was caught up in the black-and-blue swirl of my headrush. Everything except for Granger. She was the only solid thing in the entire fucking place, looking so put-together and serene with her dainty bloody hands and her blue dress and that horrid frizz-ball. How did she do it? She wasn't allowed to be so peaceful.

(Who put these chairs between us, Granger?)

"—ou know, because you're a ferret."

"Excuse me?"

(Lend me some oxygen, will you?)

"Oh, I was explaining the joke. I said it reminded me of you because of that time Moody Transfigured you into a ferr—"

"No, really? When did that happen?"

She ignored my sarcasm and smiled at me instead. "So why do you smell like blackberries?"

"It's Dooley," I muttered.

"Pardon?"

"Dooley. My House Elf. She came to my flat and charmed my tap water to smell like it. She thought it would be a thoughtful gesture."

"Well I think it's charming," she said simply.

"Sorry?"

"You should be more appreciative of the things Dooley does to make you happy. It's the little things like that."

"The little things like what? You sound like a cheap, self-help manual. In fact, you ought to write one and they can quote you on your gravestone. Hermione Granger: A woman who lived for the little things."

"Oh, shut up. It's true. I wouldn't have made it—" she cut herself off with an odd look on her face. I wondered if she was thinking about her vegetable of a husband, who was presumably lying within the same building in his own version of a waiting room. For a second she got that slump around her again, that limpness to her joints that I thought I relished seeing in her. I opened my mouth to apologise, or at least to change the subject, but she spoke before I could get it out. "That's what my Healer told me, anyway. Like the smell of coffee in the morning. Or seeing a really funny-shaped cloud that reminds you of your old Uncle Ellis' nose. Or finding a Knut on the floor under your chair."

"You'll forgive me if I say that what you just said is probably the most inane thing that I've ever heard. What would I ever do with a Knut?"

"Oh yes, I forgot how filthy rich you are," she said without malice.

I laughed. "It's not something that people often forget about me."

"You could always start a Knut collection. You know, like wonky, old Knuts that aren't in circulation anymore."

The door to the inner office opened and the white-clad Mediwitch came shuffling out with her pristine clipboard. She looked so tightly organised that I wouldn't doubt it if she came out of the womb that way, starchy robes and all.

"Granger, Hermione."

"You'll find your special Knut someday, Malfoy. You'll know it when you see it."

"Whatever, Granger," I said, looking down at my chest to hide the twitch in my mouth.

"You know, I like blackberries."

I looked up. Her grin was honeysuckle and prairie breezes, glycerine and flying too fast and sun-drenched pavement, heart stuttering on the sly and sugar quills and fire-starters and opiates and white, white teeth. I felt my ears heat up and sneered at her to make up for it.

Later, when I got home, I dreamt of trees. Of trees burning wildly on a darkling plain. And then the smoke dispersed, and there I was standing in a field surrounded by funny-shaped clouds, the smell of coffee and blackberries in the middle distance. And there, in the center of it all, was Granger.

Granger in blue, her eyes wide and her hair hopelessly unkempt, holding up to me in her pretty little hand a single, shining Knut.

* * *

**Week 25**

"I think... I think I know how Goyle died."

"Do you?"

"I keep thinking back to it, and sometimes it's night time, sometimes it's high noon. But the trees are always there. The trees and... and the smoke. And the smell."

"The smell of what, Mister Malfoy?"

"Of burning... burning... burning flesh."

"Go on." I met his eyes across the dark space. He was sitting, calmly as ever, and making notes in his clipboard. I wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him until he understood. Don't you get it, Wallace? Please tell me you do. Please tell me I'm not just seeing things.

"His house burned down. He was trapped inside. He went just like Crabbe did."

"That's not quite what happened, Mister Malfoy. Mister Goyle's ancestral home is still standing. I understand his mother lives there with her sister."

"So they built it up again, what's the big deal? We can do magic, can't we?"

"You know what happened, Draco. I know you know it. I know you understand. Do not fight me on this one, please. This is crucial to your recovery."

It was raining outside. The sound of it shot straight through my flesh and buried itself in my spine. We were somewhere underground, or underwater, somewhere that wasn't real.

Father used to say that I was a sensitive boy. He said it like it was the worst of sins. Mother would hold my hand and stroke my hair and tell me: The nerves were always strong in my family. It's the Black blood running in your veins. Don't be afraid. Tell me what you're thinking. I never know what you think anymore.

"Goyle... Goyle set himself on fire."

"You are getting very close to the truth, Draco. It's alright. We don't have to push it today."

I leapt up and swayed on my feet. "Why can't you just... Why don't you just tell me?"

"I cannot. You know very well that I want to help you in any way I can, but I cannot _suggest_, Draco. You have to remember this all by yourself. Memory is a tricky thing. It will compensate for what it has lost by filling in the blanks with whatever is available. You must take this journey alone."

His voice reached me through a murk. My head was swimming.

The little things, Granger said. Like how Goyle's flesh bubbled and popped like the viscous dregs of some potion in an old cauldron. Like how he shut his eyes desperately, as if doing so would make the flames go away. Like how there was a crackling and a hissing like a piece of meat on a spit. Like how he screamed. And how I couldn't get close enough to him to save him.

I looked down at my arms. The skin on them was puckered and completely hairless, coming together in unnatural swirls of melted and reconstructed flesh.

I dropped my body back into the chair.

"Do I have to come back?"

"I'm afraid you do, Draco. I'm sorry. We're not quite there yet."

"Goyle always had a penchant for drama. He could have just offed himself the normal way, but no. He had to go and choose the most theatrical way possible."

It didn't feel quite right leaving my mouth. Goyle was a simple fellow. He wasn't dramatic at all. It wasn't his style. But I had to tell myself_something_.

My legs were numb, my throat dry. I imagined my toes lengthening and bursting forth through the seams of my shoes, burrowing into the ground beneath. I imagined my arms growing past the ceiling in a desperate yearning for unseen sunlight. I imagined my lips sealing together, my face layered over with bark as I succumbed to the stupor of the Wood of the Suicides.

* * *

**Week 28**

There is that space in time that I like to occupy. It's small and fleeting, and if you look too hard, you will lose it altogether.

It's that stretch of seconds between a thought and a word, the silence that predicates a contraction of muscle against bone. It's a pretty little capsule of frozen time when your mind is blissfully blank. It is getting a glass of water and being entranced by the stream of clear sparkle pouring from the spigot, or scratching the back of your neck, or staring out the window at various moving nothings, or making indeterminate, never-to-be-fulfilled plans to skip town. It's a century crammed into a heartbeat, when life decides that you deserve a breather.

This is my time. This is when the voices are quiet, and Goyle is alive and making an absolute fool of himself somewhere, and I'm not so thirsty all the time, and there is nothing but me, the waiting room, and the wasted, faded daylight. Not a single tree in sight.

"You know what's funny... Ron thought I was too cynical for my own good."

This was Granger's attempt at luring me back into conversation. I hadn't been too forthcoming the past few weeks. I still dreamt of her though.

"He's got quite the temper on him, but I swear Ron's one of the most childishly happy people I know. You know what he told me, once? He said that it's the illusion that all of us logical types suffer from, that there is nothing more to the universe than the mindless gyration of atoms and molecules, that there is no deeper reality behind appearances. It is the logical delusion that after death there is nothing but a timeless void."

"Weasley didn't say that," I snapped.

"Alright, you caught me. Ron didn't say that, precisely. It was an approximation."

I clenched my jaw. "If you have a point, _make it_."

"Look, I'm not saying that we're all going to end up in a lovely field dressed in togas when we die. Or that there's going to be an infinitely unlimited buffet on the other side or something. That's what Ron thought Heaven would be like. If God knew at all what He was on about, Ron said."

"The fucking _point_, Granger."

"My _point_ is that seeing death doesn't mean you can't heal anymore. There is peace to be had, somewhere, somehow. It may not be apparent now. Or two years from now. But it's there."

"You're not fooling anyone with the 'I'm-stronger-than-anything-life-can-throw-at-me' act, Granger."

"It's not about being the strongest, Malfoy. It's not about being sane or... whole at the end of it all. You don't have to keep this up. It's about finding the little things that get you through the day. I think... in the end it's all about surviving. Any way you can."

My head made a quick spastic return to reality.

"Excuse me?"

"I... I know about Goyle. I'm sorry."

So my friend killed himself. So he went out into the woods and doused himself in Muggle petrol and set himself on fire. Big fucking deal.

"Yeah? That's special, Granger. Real deep stuff." My eyes were immediately drawn to her hands, so I dragged my gaze upwards. But I wasn't prepared to meet her eyes full on, and I closed mine again. I could feel her glare through my shut eyelids.

"I was just trying to be nice. You don't have to be such a wanker about it."

"Just stop it, Granger. I know you've somehow convinced yourself that you're the appointed saviour of all mankind, but I really don't want to hear it."

"I don't care what you think, Malfoy. Clearly, you don't have everything all figured out."

"Get off your high fucking horse. Just because your husband is in a bloody coma doesn't mean you're privy to all the suffering in the world."

My eyes flew open as I realised what I just said. Jesus fucking Christ. Yes, I'm a bastard arsehole, but even I could tell that I'd gone way over the line.

She was smiling at me. She had a smile like a false start. It was a perfectly calm smile, but something in it made me want to yank my words back from the empty space between us and stuff it back down my throat. Calamity Granger all snuffed out, but not quite.

"Thank you for that, Malfoy," she said sweetly. She was completely still, nothing but the tendons pulling taut in her white throat giving way to the tension of the moment. "Thank you ever so much for reminding me that you are scum, and that you deserve everything that comes your way."

"I'm sorry, Granger. I'm sorry about what I said." I swallowed the fist-sized clot of sand bobbing in my trachea. "How... how is Weasley?"

She had this look on her face—like she wasn't sure if she should laugh or cry—and I had the funny feeling that she was veering more towards laughing. It was unsettling. I wanted to look away. I wanted desperately to look away. Why the hell did I apologise?

"Ron will never wake up again."

Her words smashed into me, ramming their way one by one into my reality. I scrutinized her face for... _something_, but it was perfectly blank. She delivered that line perfectly. The only explanation was that it was rehearsed dozens of times in front of a mirror. Rehearsed brutally over and over until it became inescapable. And there she sat, unmoving and unmoved. My lungs were filled with the cruelty of it. I waited for the earth to crack under the weight of her pronouncement, for our flimsy chairs to tip and fall into the abyss, but it did not come.

(Hang me up to dry, Draco.)

"Calm down, Malfoy. It's alright. I'm alright. I'm sorry too. You're not scum. You're actually quite alright."

"I don't care."

"You don't? I could have sworn you were starting to hyperventilate."

"Shut up." It came out as a hoarse whisper. I cleared my throat.

"We've all lost someone in the war, and the longer we live, the more we will lose. Your problem, Malfoy, is that you've seen death and now you think things are either laughter or despair. Everything is both, so you might as well get something out of it. The little things, Malfoy. Keep the little things to yourself. Keep them close to your heart, and you'll be fine."

(Tell me something that makes you cry, Granger.)

Her lips were just as dainty as her hands. Gently parted, breathing in and out. I wondered what it would feel like to be a word conceived in her mouth, the shape of me formed through those lips of hers.

"—at's what my Healer told me. Look for the little things."

"Like the funny Knuts?"

"Like the funny Knuts."

It wasn't fair. Her husband was permanently damaged, and yet here she sat, unruffled in the face of human mortality.

(I fought the war, but the war won.)

"Granger, Hermione."

She gathered her belongings together and stood. Did I think she looked like a burnout? Because I was dead wrong. That thing in her that pissed me off so much—that core of steel and dignity and huffy, self-righteous conviction—it was still there. She'd lost some of it, maybe. The showy, dangly parts that weren't really important. It wasn't fair. What deity decided which people got to keep themselves?

(You and me, baby, we're like entropy. We are spontaneous combustion in a sealed chamber. We are stars dying an ecstatic death. We are perpetual motion machines breeding rust in our gaskets, and I think you are flash-bang beautiful.)

Granger left. There was no backward glance, no parting quip.

She was bulletproof porcelain and I? I am her shock waves. I am the shrapnel. I am the plume of dust around her unmoving feet.

I almost said goodbye, but I remembered that I'd be seeing her again in a week. And later, in my dreams.

* * *

A/N: To be continued.

I'd love to hear what you think!


	2. Chapter 2

**Week 31**

"What happened on the night of the 27th of December?"

"We're back to this, are we?"

"And so we shall keep going back, until the day you can answer my question, Mister Malfoy."

Wallace, you _spud_. You ingrate. Wallace, you trigger-happy _pustule_. Who gave you the right to ask all the questions?

"I thought I _did_ remember," I muttered, sucking the salt off my bottom lip and looking to the side.

"You don't remember enough."

It was a queer day. I woke up from a wet slumber at four in the morning—three hours earlier than usual. By nine I'd had eight cups of coffee, and there was so much caffeine in my system I thought my eyeballs would shrivel up and fall out. I learned about caffeine in Muggle Studies. Basically all it is is a tiny little piece of fluff that grabs your nervous system in a vicious chokehold and doesn't let go until you tap out. My final project was a research project and my thesis was that magical folk were immune to the addictive effects of caffeine. I was the control as well as the variable group. Hence my caffeine addiction.

The air in Wallace's office smelt of mould and mirages. God, I was sick to death of talking about Goyle.

What did a bloke have to do to get some peace around here?

Goyle committed suicide in the most irrevocable way possible—he _set himself on fire_, for fuck's sake—and yet here he remained, his fat head still hovering over my shoulder like the charred dregs of an old dream, his unblessed ashes still clinging to the back of my teeth.

I thought of Granger, and how she seemed to shake off the ashes of _her_ old dreams with a grace I wanted for myself. I thought of thin blue straps laced around a pair of bony, white shoulders. I thought of how she wasn't pretty at all. I thought of what I would say later, if by chance I bumped into her in the waiting room as I left. Bugger her, the bint.

The sight of Wallace—good, old, reliable, mushroomy Wallace, his eyes shining with synthetic sympathy—brought me back to the present. I supposed his treatment was paying off. I no longer wanted to stomp his teeth in. Perhaps just a couple of them.

"You ever been to the Manor, Wallace?"

His eyes lit up. No doubt this apparently random change of subject intrigued him, and he was hoping to unravel some new tentacle to whatever chimerical ailment had my brain in its slippery grip.

Scritch-scratch-scritch-scratch went his quill.

"Several times," Wallace said, nodding at his notes.

"You ever been in the winter?"

"No... No, I don't believe so. Is there something special about the Manor in the winter?"

I pressed my back against the armchair and relished in the cooled whisper of leather. I thought for a few moments.

"The Manor has its own special kind of darkness, did you know that, Wallace?"

"I did not."

"I'm not talking doom-and-despair darkness or anything melodramatic and metaphysical like that. I mean the Manor's rather old, and we had a full set of dungeons—manacles and steel bars and all the works—but the interior itself is actually quite airy. What I'm referring to is the quality of the light, especially in the dead of winter. Do you follow?"

"I think I do. Please continue, Draco."

"In the middle of December it gets cold. Really cold. It's a kind of cold that the warming system built into our walls can't quite dissipate. It's like... It wads around your ears and creeps under your skin. Galvanizes your bones. And everything is sort of... stiffened into place and rebirthed in this hazy, jagged light. You know the kind of light the sky spits out at dawn?"

(Everyone is stiffened into a grotesque simulacrum of life. Like dead trees. Like burnt nerves.)

"Yes, indeed. _Winter dawn is the colour of metal_. That's a line from Sylvia Pla—"

"It's a light so heavy it's practically shadow. Everything looks different. Clean. Almost sinisterly so. Everything surrounded in noiseless echo, even your thoughts. And the cold and the darkness and... just everything. It's overwhelming. You get this feeling like the snow is packed up to your eye sockets, wrapping around your skull, and that it will never go away. Cabin fever, I suppose you could call it. Mother never understood when I tried to tell her. Father was impervious, and uncaring. Goyle loathed coming to the Manor in winter."

I was babbling. It was alright with me. I paid him to pull all the babble out of me, after all.

(I hate it here, Draco. Unbuckle my wrists. Get me out.)

"Did Gregory visit you at the Manor on the 27th of December?"

"Don't call him that."

"Don't call him what?"

"Don't call him Gregory. I was his best friend, and I called him Goyle."

"I am sorry, Mister Malfoy. What would you like me to call him?"

"I don't _fucking_ know, do I? Just don't call him Gregory."

"Alright, I won't."

"Okay. Fine. Anyway. It's funny, because in the winter the sky is actually bluer than it's ever been all year, you know? It's that... that _bam_ kind of blue. That audacious, in-your-face blue. Like it's just daring you to find something wrong with the world. Like nothing bad could ever happen. Like nothing bad has ever happened, and all the hurt you've ever experienced was all just a bad dream. And the only thing that helps you remember that there is pain in the world is the taste of cold in the air. It's funny because the cold I hate so much is the only thing that got me through those winters. Everyone's crazy in the winter around the Manor. Goyle said..."

(Goyle said it's a lie. Goyle said that they're trying to put you under. Goyle said Draco look at that sluice of stone. Draco look at that black pond. Draco look at the deadened trees. Goyle said I want to reach my fist into the core of it and pull out its still-beating heart, and I want to swallow it whole. Goyle said no Draco I don't want to die. I want to set it all on fire.)

"—at did Goyle say? I _may_ call him Goyle, yes?"

"Yes, yes, whatever. Goyle is fine. He said... He said it made him want to hurl himself out of the window."

I laughed, remembering the way Goyle scrunched his shapeless nose up at the clouds as if they'd done him a great personal offense.

"Goyle couldn't stand it. Neither could I. That's why I did it, I guess."

I was babbling. I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race. Sometimes I wanted to drop so far down that I forgot there was ever a word for escape.

(How do you reckon I'd get my hands on Muggle petrol?)

"_You_ did it?"

"Sorry?"

"You said: that's why I did it."

I shook the caffeine buzz out of my ears. I thought I heard my brain rattle in its compartment. Slop-slop-slop in its own souring juices.

"No I... Did I? I meant Goyle, obviously. That's why he killed himself. We _were_ talking about Goyle weren't we?"

"Yes, dear boy, we were."

"Sorry. Just wanted to keep things straight in my head. I suppose it was a protracted version of cabin fever. Ennui. Desperation. Confusion. Loneliness. Maybe he blamed himself for Crabbe's death. Maybe he just couldn't watch everyone move on when he couldn't. Or that's part of it. I don't pretend to know everything that went on under his thick skull. Maybe he just wanted to know what fire felt like, or how hot he could stand it before he had to start screaming."

* * *

**Week 33**

Few people in this world know that Goyle was blond, and before he started shaving his head he used to put a lot of shit in his hair—some sort of sculpting product—and the raw, pinkish parting in his scalp was the straightest thing I'd ever seen. Goyle was blonder than I am, I reckon. Crabbe and I used to give him hell for it, and one day he came to the Manor with his hair all gone, nothing but a nubby, pockmarked stub of a head left in its place. I felt bad for it. I felt really bad. Of course I never apologized. Crabbe did, but he was always a sentimental bastard.

I dreamt of Goyle. It was better than dreaming of Granger.

Maybe.

I knew it was a dream. I was getting better. I knew it was a dream because I was watching Goyle burn, and instead of going to help him I was on my knees crying. His lips were purpling, his body flayed outwards, the whole thing stilted and granular like an old, forgotten tragedy. If it were real I would have been running away. That's what I'm good at, after all. Botching things up and running away. Then before I knew it Goyle had somehow got too close to me, close enough that I felt like I was evaporating, close enough that we shared each other's breath, and I forgot where the fire ended and Goyle began and where I joined in. And it was _glorious_.

Then suddenly someone was shaking me awake and I was blinking tears away from my eyes. It was Granger. This time I wasn't sure if it was a dream or not. Funny, that.

"Malfoy. _Malfoy_. You alright?"

(I see the sky in you, Granger.)

I closed my eyes. I could never bear looking at her. I felt dull and flat and squirmy and full of shattered visions. The image of broken teeth surrounded in leaping flames lingered behind the raw, red screen of my eyelids. So I opened my eyes again and focused on the text of the _Daily Prophet_ hanging limply from my slack fingers. I wanted to crawl through the black lines of print the way you'd crawl through the gaps in a fence.

"Get off me," I managed to grunt, shaking her grip off and sitting upright. I was tempted to move a seat over as she'd taken the one next to me, but I didn't want it to look like her presence affected me in any way, so I stayed. I could have done very well with some Firewhiskey, neat. A bottle. A big old stinking vat. I could bathe in the stuff and stay there forever. Alcohol was flammable, wasn't it?

The rambling lines of though must have been showing on my face, and I knew that because Granger was looking at me like I was some sort of freak show. I asked her what she was reading to change the subject. It didn't occur to me at the time that I could have just coldly ignored her, and she probably would have gone away.

"Anna Karenina," she replied brightly, apparently pleased with me. I felt as though I needed to compensate for showing interest, so I sneered as nastily as I could at the thick book. It did not appease me.

"What's it about?" I asked her in spite of myself. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. _Fuck_.

Don't tell me I don't want to know I don't care why can't you just go back to being sad, Granger?

(I hear the sea in you, Granger.)

"Oh, you know, familial intrigue, just regular things like hypocrisy, jealousy, faith, fidelity, marriage, society, that kind of thing."

"Sounds dull. It suits you."

"Oh, I forgot. There's also loads of carnal desire."

I swallowed. "Hmm."

(Last night, you smelt of water vapour and freedom and sweat and sunlight, and I tasted you on my tongue.)

"—arried woman named Anna Karenina who falls in love with an officer named Vronsky. I don't think you'd like it, really, and I'm only reading it because apparently it's one of the best novels of the nineteenth century and obviously I can't keep on calling myself Hermione Granger if I don't have this down in my repertoire."

"Obviously."

"What were you dreaming of?"

She asked me so suddenly that I was tricked into responding honestly. "Goyle," I said. The word hung in the air between us like some ugly, ugly scrap of a thing condemned to putrefaction. I wondered if she remembered what he looked like.

"Oh."

"Yeah. He…" I cleared my throat, trying to work my air pipe around the bristled lump that formed there. "He killed himself."

"I know." Her tone was apologetic, and I didn't have it in me to be angry with her for it.

"He set himself on fire." I could tell that the other crazy laddies were eavesdropping. Have at it then, fellas. Gather round, grab a seat, get yourselves warm. There's enough mental imbalance to go around.

"Oh." Her glance brushed across the skin on my arms, leaving the hairs on them standing at attention. I noticed a look on her face that I'd seen before painting other people's faces. Morbid curiosity with a touch of revulsion. Mother used to tell me when I was a child that if I didn't stop scowling, my face would be permanently disfigured and I would look like a bowtruckle. Maybe it was something like that. Maybe I was deformed in some way that I was so used to looking at, that I hardly noticed it myself. I resisted the urge to scratch.

She frowned and looked down, putting her face back in her book. She might as well have been seated at the opposite end of the building. Or at the other end of town. She might as well have been locked up in a vault and thrown to the bottom of an ocean, for all I could reach of her. I supposed I got what I wanted.

I was beginning to drift away again. I was being eaten away by the light. This wasn't so unusual with me these days. Wallace said it was a sign that I was definitely getting better, and that the day when I would never have to return here was within the foreseeable future. Anyway, it wasn't a half-bad sensation, losing awareness. I wondered how long I could push it. How long I could stay asleep. How deep the abyss was, and if it really did stare back if you looked too long. Was it possible to die just by losing the will to live?

Goddamn, I needed to take a piss.

"—not sure if I should be saying anything about this." I looked up. Granger was still staring deep into the pages of her book like it contained the dirtiest secrets of the universe. She was wringing her hands. This got my attention, as I knew her to be rarely shy.

"Huh?" was my award-winning response.

"I _said_ I'm not sure if I should be saying anything about Goyle. About… his death. If I have the right to say anything."

She squared her shoulders and huffed out a breath as if I was the one irritating her.

"Then don't say anythi—"

"But I've already decided that you need to hear it. You see, Malfoy… I know you're hurting now. I know people tell you left and right that they know how you feel. And that you're sick of hearing it, and sometimes you'd rather just stuff your fingers in your eardrums until you can feel them in your brain and you can't hear a single meaningless platitude anymore."

She was looking at my arms again. Then she dragged her gaze up, up, up my skin, spanning my shoulders, curving around my throat. When her eyes clicked onto mine, I thought that hers were the exact colour of the dirt-clad stones that lined the creek running behind the Manor.

"You're off your rocker, Granger."

"No, I'm not. Because I _do_ know how you feel. But you see… you have to hear that there is beauty in everything, Malfoy. You _have_ to hear it, or you'll die. Yes, it's that important. There is beauty in everything, even in violent death."

(Let me tell you a story, Draco. Let me tell you a story of how I died and of how my friends tried to stick me together with spit and string.)

Suddenly I was angry, and the anger was so big and palpitating that I was frightened, and this angered me even more. "You were right. You _don't_ have the fucking right to—to_preach_ your fucking rainbows-and-sunshine life lessons at me—"

"Anna met Vronsky at the railway station when someone was run over by a train."

I snorted derisively. "_That's_ your key fucking evidence? You're going to quote the _greatest novel of the nineteenth century_ at me?"

"I'm not yet finished," she retorted, her jaw set in a way that I remembered from the war. She was beautiful in that moment, and I choked on a glob of spit in my throat. She took advantage of my momentary silence to barrel on. "They met at the railway station at someone else's moment of death. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train."

"Are you telling me that I ought to go jump in front of the Hogwarts Express?" I clamped my lips tight against a bubbling of laughter threatening to effervesce madly from the pit of my stomach. I had the urge to just let it loose. Laugh in her face.

"Don't you see, Malfoy? There is symmetry in life. We all live according to a symmetrical composition. Human lives are composed like music, and without realizing it, we seek the balm of beauty even in times of great distress. Especially times of great distress. Anna could have died any other way. But she was enticed by the railway station—to that place known only to her as the birthplace of love. It's… It's _balance_. The little things balance us out. Haven't you found your special Knut yet?"

Yes I have but it's covered in dirt and it's lodged deep in the riverbank and I don't know how to pick it up for myself. The current's too strong. The water's too cold. My hands are too—

Too—

"That sounds like a load of philosophical bollocks, especially coming from you."

(I'm just as fucked up as they say.)

"I'm not saying anything other than that there is beauty in life. There is beauty in the most absurd of things. There is beauty in the ugliest of things. The world doesn't make sense half the time, and the other half we're too much in pain to care. But at the very least we have beauty. It's enough to survive off of, if you're smart. You can take consolation in that."

She looked so bloody adamant that I almost believed her. _Merlin_. How do people like her still exist? It was all like a big, fucking inside joke that I wanted to laugh at but just didn't get.

"Goyle never read a single book in his life. How is that supposed to help him?"

(Just as fucked up. Give me a kiss, Granger. Give me a sugar-sweet smack right to my gaping air duct.)

"It's not supposed to help _him_. Goyle is dead. It's supposed to help _you_."

Her smile was gentle and soothing and ever so slightly awkward, and I'd be lying if I said that the big bad something inside of me didn't go away at that very moment.

* * *

**Week 37**

"Do you believe in the human soul, Draco?"

"The human soul?"

"Yes. The essence of a person. According to some religious and philosophical traditions, it is immortal."

"We have the magic to make a person immortal. I don't figure where a soul comes into the picture."

"That's a fair point. But perhaps the issue of immortality is irrelevant. What I'm really asking is, do you believe in a separation between the mind and the body? Do you believe we are driven by an animating principle, by… a _spirit_, shall we say?"

"What does it matter what I believe in? The truth shall persist, regardless."

Wallace looked pleased with my answer. "What a very scientific way of looking at it."

"Science. Logic. Common Sense. Whatever."

"Something tells me you are more inclined to believe that we are merely bags of chemical reactions—zipping about life at the mercy of our enzymes."

"Enzymes?"

"Ah, forgive me. It is a Muggle term. I'd assumed you'd be familiar with it. It doesn't matter, at any rate."

The urge to overturn him—fat bottom over equally fat head—was getting stronger.

"I don't believe that."

"That we are no better than animals?"

"I don't _want_ to believe that. I guess I do, now that I think of it. I can't help it. Gra—someone told me that there is beauty in everything."

"And did you believe her?"

"What makes you think it's a 'her'?"

"Oh, lucky guess."

"I don't know. It would be nice to. Then we'd have at least one more thing in common other than both of us being a little batty."

"Do you fancy her?"

"Fuck off."

I felt Wallace's intrigued gaze prickling across my forehead. Thankfully, he gave up on this line of questioning.

"Have you ever wondered about the first men? Long, long ago, before magic, before the discovery of fire. The first men would lie in the darkness, listening to the regular beats in his chest with sheer amazement. He'd feel its pulse grow stronger with each breath and wonder, and he'd be content to wonder. And then, as mankind progressed, we uncovered the mysteries of the body. There is little left to discover. The soul was then the remainder, left over after the body was accounted for. It is that thing which looks, listens, fears, thinks, marvels, loves."

I remained silent.

"Isn't it sad? Today, we think of the soul as nothing more than the grey matter of the brian in action. The Muggles do, at least. We aren't too far behind. Being gifted with magic, we are a people very difficult to impress. The soul is shrouded in technical terminology. We bottle its essence, pour it in Pensieves, fashion spells out of it. It is nothing more than a Potions ingredient."

I laughed. It was the fakest thing that I'd ever forced out of my throat. "Listen, Wallace. Have you ever dueled anyone?"

"Why, certainly. I went to Hogwarts too, you know."

"Not like that. Not in a cozy little castle surrounded by your friends. Have you ever dueled anyone for your life?"

"No, I can't say I have. I am but a quiet Healer, Mister Malfoy, and I do hope I never have to—"

"Have you ever killed a man?"

(Evaporation. Electrocution. _Execution_.)

Wallace's eyes turned steely. I was taken aback. They did not suit his flabby face. "No. I have never killed a man."

(Draco, Draco, you are no killer.)

"Here's how it is, Wallace. With a wand jammed so far into the back of your throat you can feel it in your gut, you can only talk in vowels. And the only thing that is going through your head at that moment is not your soul, not an _animating principle_, not the possibility of an afterlife. The only thing—the _only thing_—that is going through your head at that very moment is a single thought: Please God I hope I don't fucking piss myself."

(Draco, Draco, you are no killer.)

I didn't notice myself getting to my feet, but I was already there, jabbing a finger in Wallace's direction. I curled it into my fist. "It's easy to talk about souls when you've never been confronted by the imminent probability of losing it. It's so easy to fucking _pontificate_, isn't it? But unless you can tell me that you know—with complete, sacred conviction—that on a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero, that everyone you've ever loved _will_ die, and you will be there to see half of them do it, unless you can tell me that you'd rather _set yourself on fire_ than live another second on this godforsaken scrap of barren dirt, then don't you _ever_ fucking ask me if I believe in the human soul."

I was breathing harder than I had a right to be at that moment. I was starving for air and no amount of it would calm the brag of my heart.

(Into the lightless hibernaculum. Into the crowded necropolis. Down we go. Watch your head.)

Wallace smiled at me calmly. It was when he was like this that I hated him most. He couldn't know anything. He didn't know a damn thing. And yet here he sat stuffed to the brim with self-satisfaction as though he had a wealth of tomorrows to look forward to. And it was true. He did. He had nothing but tomorrows in front of him, rolling wide and green. _I_was the one who was clinically dead, not Wallace.

Did I say dead? I meant insane.

"Very good, Mister Malfoy. I believe we are done for the day."

* * *

**Week 43**

She was just dying to ask me, I could tell.

Ah, here it came.

"Why do you have two cups of coffee?" She made an effort to come off as light and uncaring, but she couldn't quite hide the hope in her tone.

"They're both mine."

I almost laughed when her mouth collapsed with disappointment.

"Don't start crying now. You can have the other one if you promise to shut up for the rest of your life."

She had buttermilk-pale skin. The exhaustion was plain as pumpkin juice on her face. Her hair was lit from behind by the paling window, the red filaments mixed in with the brown flaring to life. She lurked in my periphery just like that—improbably, infuriatingly—and I could have sworn she was divine if I wasn't so sure she was a Mudblood.

It wasn't so bad as I thought it would be. Her being a Mudblood, I meant.

I handed her the coffee. She held the traveler's mug—a plastic green one I got from Pansy an era ago—with both hands. Both tiny, tiny hands.

"Do you believe in the human soul?" I asked her before I could stop myself.

"What? What an odd question," she said thoughtfully, putting Anna Whotsit down on the chair beside her and quirking a smile.

"Well, do you?"

"Hmm. I think that's one of those questions that don't really matter what the answer is, if that makes sense."

"How do you figure?"

"Well, regardless of what I believe, it doesn't make a bit of difference, does it? All I know is that I am, and I think, and I feel, and that's enough for me."

"Funny," I said without irony.

"Pardon?"

"It's just… that's exactly what I said to my Healer. Or something like it."

At times like this I forget that there were other people in the waiting room. It was nice. Like a sterile little universe, all to my own. Just Granger and I, and our dead hanging around us like morbid, fleshy balloons.

"I think—if souls do exist—I think you'd have a beautiful soul, Draco Malfoy." I spluttered on my coffee and felt the tips of my ears heat up. She continued talking as if nothing happened. "Souls are like Bertie Botts beans, I think. Some are delicious, some are... Well, some taste like the underside of someone's sweaty foot. But there's always someone who has a favourite. Even the gross ones. There's always some misguided bloke somewhere that buys a whole package just for the pimple flavoured ones. I think you'd be creme brûlée."

"You'd be mud," I retorted. It was a lie. She'd be milk chocolate, or toffee, or treacle tart. No, perhaps she'd be a more bittersweet flavour, like wine. I was seized by the urge to press my open mouth on the base of her neck, to gather the light dusting of moisture there and taste her.

I bared my teeth in an unctuous smile when she glared at me. I had to know, though. "Why creme brûlée?"

"Because you're blond as a sodding Barbie doll, and that was the closest colour I could come up with on the fly. It works though. You know. You're all crusty on the outside, but on the inside you're just a big, creamy pile of mush. Incidentally, that was Ron's favourite flavour."

"Oh." I looked away as her chin started to quiver.

I had a feeling that she might start crying as girls often did at times like this, so I did what my mother told me to do and pulled out a handkerchief. It was soiled and had a tea-ring stain on a corner of it. I held it with two fingers and tossed it in her lap.

"What? Is this… Is this a bloody _handkerchief_?" She held it up to the light. Her wrist was a brittle radius covered in firm flesh. She sounded irked for some reason. I got defensive.

"Yeah. We normally use it to keep snot fro—"

"People still carry these things around?" she asked incredulously. I couldn't tell if she was being genuine or sarcastic. "What would you even need it _for_?"

"Good _manners_, Granger, but I wouldn't expect you to—"

"Yes, but we've got magic, haven't we?"

I bristled. "My wand's been put under a monitoring charm. I can't do any more than very basic spells."

"Oh," it was her turn to mumble abashedly. The vicious satisfaction I expected to feel at having shamed her never showed up. Bloody hell.

"It's for in case I find myself put upon by sniffling, emotionally unhinged females."

That got a wan smile out of her. I still felt bad. Pity wasn't what I wanted to feel for her. I didn't want any part of her to be vulnerable. Not around me.

"Look… Granger. How is… How's your husband doing?" I couldn't bring myself to say his name. It felt wrong all the way down to my marrow.

"He's fine. He's… doing as well as he could be, considering."

"Well, at least… At least he had that time before he… When—you know—you had each other. At least he had you. For a little bit." My lips felt stiff and unused. The words tumbled clumsily out from between my teeth, all crusty and ugly and meaningless and feeble from being holed up inside of me for too long. All I had were my old words and unwieldy sentiments, and I hoped fervently that my tongue could form them into something new. I wanted to kick myself. She smiled at me, though.

"Thank you, Malfoy. Thank you so much for saying that." And then she _did_ start tearing up. "_Ugh_," she giggled through her tears, "Don't you just _hate_ sniffling, emotionally unhinged females?"

"Careful, Granger. That sounds like penis envy," I said, echoing a term I heard in a bar once. "Do you ever wish you had a penis?" I was pushing it. I never knew what was too far with her. I could never help myself though. That was always my excuse. I was helpless around her.

(You annihilate me.)

She sat up primly in her chair and took a sip of coffee.

"No, I don't think so. But I wish I had an ovipositor so I could parasitize my enemies and infest them with my larvae."* She winked outrageously at me, and I felt something clench in the region of my ribcage, as though my body was strung with wire and all of them were pulled taut at once. I sneered at her because it was better than grinning like a sodding pillock.

* * *

**Week 48**

" I read somewhere that there were these two big Muggle wars. World Wars one and two, they called them. Very economical. They're good at that, aren't they? Reducing things to numbers?"

I was getting bad again. I didn't know why. Maybe it was one of those things where it got worse—far, far worse—before it got better. I was losing my grip on the horizon. I spent all of last night rearranging my furniture. I screamed for Dooley and told her to get the hell out and never come back. Mother wrote me a note since she wasn't allowed to see me, but I haven't opened it. It lay there on my bed, a pale, lilac square pulsing from within with motherly affectations.

I dreamt him face down into the ground last night, a stony actor like Michelangelo's David, milk-marble and valor on the surface, but his face paralyzed with terror. He looked at me with wide, blank eyes.

"Astute observation, Mister Malfoy. Do continue. What else have you learned about these wars?"

(I've heard of bombs. Of radiation. Of cells bursting outwards forever and ever.)

"England played a big role in both of them, I think. In the second one—World War II—when the English were retreating from France, they made sure to burn anything that could be used by the advancing enemy. Shoot the horses. Siphon the petrol from the trucks."

"Like you said, very economical. That was a cynical way to fight a war, but then what war isn't fought by cynics?"

My skin was burning, burning, burning. I needed a drink. The lights were popping in and out of existence. Where did they go? Off to that parallel dimension again, I supposed. I wondered if there was another version of me somewhere deep in the bowels of the universe. Another version of Goyle. Another Granger. If there was, I wanted to go there—squeeze my body into the interdimensional portal—and I wanted to warn them. It's not real. Get out while you still can.

"_We_ should have been burned at the end of the war. Look at us. We are zombies. We... we are... bags of... we are bags of medical waste."

"Have you gone to see your mother again, Draco? I told you it wouldn't be good for you. She is one of your triggers. Didn't we agree that you ought to refrain from visiting with her until you are better?"

Sometimes I would dream of Goyle and in my dream he'd be alive. Sometimes I would dream of Goyle and in my dream he'd be looking at me like I'd just stolen something precious to him. Sometimes we'd switch places. I no longer knew who was killing who. Those were the best dreams and I hated them as much as I longed for them. They were like flying—like when you're flying away from the pitch and every second the people and the hoops and the stands get smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, only you feel it's really you that's getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all you've ever known at about a million miles an hour.

"What happened on the 27th of December, Wallace? What happened to _me_?" My voice was nothing more than a cracked whisper hovering an inch above the ground like a death rattle. There I was again, my skin evaporating off my bones like the tail end of a pretty dream, my heart cleaved in half.

(All I want out of life is a bit of excitement. A bit of arbitrary ignition. Care to help me out?)

I took the vial out from my pocket. The sides of it were sloshed with a nebulous, black fluid as I shook it in Wallace's face.

"Don't bother lying to me. I woke up to Dooley trying to pour this into my mouth. She wasn't charming my tap water to smell like blackberries."

I popped the cap off with my thumb. A charming blackberry odour immediately permeated the room.

"That... ah. That is a mild—_very_ mild—sedative. It's a precautionary measure, my dear boy. . One minor side-effect is a subtle but lingering blackberry scent. Don't let it worry you. Tell me, how did you get the House Elf to tell yo—"

"_Don't_. Toy with me." I sounded like my father.

Wallace pursed his meaty lips. Sighed. Pulled an envelope out from between the pages of his notes.

"Look at me, Draco."

(Look at me, Draco. Draco. Draco. You are no killer. You are an erupting disaster, but you are no killer.)

"Yes, sir." The uncharacteristic urgency in his tone called to the sycophantic, whiny little boy that still resided within me.

"This was devised as a last resort only. The very last. Do you understand?"

It was just an envelope. I didn't get it. I nodded anyway.

"You are not to open this until you have my express permission. This is—Draco, _look_ at me—this is very important. Do not open it."

I clenched my jaw and nodded gravely, the way my father taught me. He told me you could tell a man by his nod and by his handshake. It was all crap and twaddle, pseudo-masculine piffle he force-fed me to make himself feel like a better father. Wallace was seemingly reassured by my seriousness and handed me the envelope. I hefted the weight of it in my hand. Funny. I thought this moment would be more… violent. I waited for the catch, for the swing of the guillotine, but there was none. I was left standing there, feeling vaguely appalled and close to vomiting, the envelope perched awkwardly in my open hand.

"Sleep on it, Mister Malfoy. It will come to you. Do not be afraid of the bottom. Remember: a healed memory is not a deleted memory."

* * *

**End Notes:** *****A line from Gender Characteristics, by FJ Bergmann. Also, if a line sounds like Sylvia Plath to you, that's because it is Sylvia Plath. There are several lines of poetry inserted here to echo Draco's weird obsession with it, but don't worry, I didn't just cram a bunch of borrowed words together to write this story! About 99% of the stuff is a result of my own caffeine overload. Let me know what you think! Thanks for reading :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Week 51**

I woke up this morning with shafts of sunlight prying open the sleep-gummed apertures of my eyelids open like some over-enthusiastic celestial chisel. Somewhere, God was giggling with glee at the thought of robbing another poor sod of rest.

I made my way blearily to the loo, and there I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I panicked for a good two minutes, convinced that the corruption percolating in my brain was somehow spreading outward, manifesting itself in shiny pinkish criss-crossing puddles of rawness all over my face.

Was that even possible? Could something that was all in my head find its way into the plane of physical reality?

Great. Thank you, God.

I brought a hand to my face to touch the bruise-flecked flesh, wondering how I could possibly show up at the waiting room now, when I thought that my mirror image's answering movements were delayed by a scant second.

I remembered reading in a silly little book once that mirrors were portals into a different dimension. That time is not linear, and every time someone made a choice, it branched out into these infinitely varied rivulets of possibility. The birth of a universe with every trivial decision. And the only way you could access these alien worlds was through a mirror.

Good evening, sir. May I take your coat? Have a seat. Welcome to the Great Sisyphean Tragedy of Life.

Thank you, God.

I considered staying home today. I was just one week short of a whole year of going to therapy. Surely they'd be considerate. I could send them a note.

I'm sorry, Wallace old boy. I just couldn't make it. My crazy is bleeding out into my face, and the next dimension over is bleeding out into mine. We'll re-schedule, eh?

I looked at the mirror and waited. It felt like an important moment, like one of those grand episodes of sudden self-discovery. Maybe today was the day I'd finally remember. I was expecting something astounding to happen—maybe spontaneous chemical disincorporation, or for my reflection to start speaking to me or whatever—but nothing unusual came. I blinked again and our movements matched up. My skin looked perfectly normal.

I thought it might be the insomnia acting up again. When you have insomnia everything comes at you from inside the slow shimmer of a heat haze. Everything is slippery and languorous. The air takes its sweet time getting to your brain, and you have to take extra special care trying to think a thought all the way to its completion. You start out with a coherent idea and you follow it down the channels of your brain, and then suddenly the path does a complete screwdriver twist on you and there was no thought, no path, no nothing, and you are left lost and gasping and thirsty as all hell and everyone is staring at you like what the fuck is wrong with you, mate?

Nothing can come from nothing. Shakespeare and Parmenides and Darwin all said that.

My skin felt tight and old like scar tissue. It looked normal, though. In the mirror my cross-dimensional visitor prodded his cheeks and grinned at me. I made up a story for him. His name was Maco Dralfoy. He had loving parents. He had everything he'd ever wanted, including a dog. He was studying to be an astronaut.

The end.

In Muggle studies they told us that the human brain is made up of about one hundred billion nerve cells called neurons. Each of these neurons makes from one to ten thousand contacts with other neurons. These points are called synapses. Each synapse can be on or off at any given moment. With all these permutations, the number of possible brain states easily smokes the number of elementary particles in the known universe.

There is the fimbria. The fornix. The indium griseum. The locus ceoruleus. The nucleus motoris dissipatus formationis of Riley. The medulla oblongata. The corpus callosum. The substantia inominata. I didn't learn these names in Muggle Studies. I read about them all by myself. Somewhere in all that pulsing grey matter, there is a specific pattern of zapping electrochemical impulses that the poets have collectively labelled 'love.'

My parents loved me. Me. Draco, not Maco. They just had a strange way of showing it.

After Goyle died Mother cried and told me she loved me. That she was sorry. That it wasn't my fault, and what could she do to help?

Father turned the full piercing impact of his silver stare at me and placed his warm palm around my collarbone and said, "We are a dying breed, son." Like Goyle's death was just another notch in the casualty list for him. At times I've thought that despite all his anger at the Muggles and the Mudbloods stealing our birthright, he was glad to be a part of a dying breed. It gave him purpose and direction. Without all the impending doom pressing in from all directions, he was just another Pure-blooded puff of smoke.

A dying breed.

It made me think of mushrooms, or moss, or things that grow in the dark and smell of earth and ammonia and decay. We were like the lichen clinging to the cracked bark of the trees around the Manor: slimy and desperate.

Mother and Father were supportive. They insisted that I go to therapy.

It's time for you to move on, they said.

Please, Draco. Move on.

Mother's hand was cool against my fever-glazed forehead. In that moment I hardly knew who she was. My parents were both unfamiliar to me.

Alien.

Impostors.

I looked at Maco and Maco looked at me and in perfect synchrony we contemplated our doppelgängers.

_His_ parents were Marcissa and Mucius Dralfoy. They lived in a big house ringed all around by large, forbidding trees. They had no dark thoughts, or shame, or malice. They lived lives of Apricot Ice and Strawberry Cheesecake. The trees kept them safe. If a war or a nuclear disaster or a tornado were to find them in their placid tree-ringed idyll, they would dust themselves off, pick themselves up, and say: Move on. Move on. Move on.

This is how Sisyphus stayed sane.

Thank you, God.

* * *

**Week 54**

"For a second there I thought you were Harry."

I looked around, trying to figure out which bespectacled tosser she was talking to, before I realized she was looking straight at me. I made a quizzical gesture toward the glasses perched on my nose. "Are you serious? I resent that."

I handed her coffee and sat in an empty seat three spots away. I ignored the very obvious eye-rolling coming from Jones' direction.

"Well, you don't _really_ look like him. I think it's just a Pavlovian response to glasses on my part. So?"

"So… what?"

"So why are you wearing the glasses? Do keep up," she scoffed. She was wearing her hair in a thick plait down her back. I supposed it was an attempt to get it under control, but it just made her entire head look fuzzy with all the curls that were trying to escape their constraints. It didn't look bad.

"Can't see," I grumbled, hiding the bottom half of my face behind my mug.

"Oh, come on, don't give me that. I know for a fact that you have perfect vision."

"Oh?"

"I've noticed you read over my shoulder from six seats away. How else could you come up with such detailed insults about my choice of reading material if you weren't so intimately acquainted with its contents?" She rose from her seat and settled herself in the one next to me. This happened every week, and I wondered why we didn't just sit together in the first place. I guess we were both the type of people who needed excuses to do things. Jones elbowed Mallory and they both slipped me a salacious wink.

"Yes, hmmm," she frowned, getting all up in my face with an expression of mock concentration. "Up close, you don't look like Harry at all."

"Don't be daft. You could tell us apart from two bloody miles."

"You're right. Harry's the handsome one."

"If _handsome_ is code for grotesquely malformed glans-headed spunk gobbler, then, yeah, I guess—"

"Ugh, _yuck_. Don't be crude. Anyway, how can you possibly see in those? The lenses are practically six inches thick."

"I don't need to see. The big show is in my head."

"Take them off."

"What? No—"

She ducked under my arm and made a sly pass for them. The metal slid coolly against my temples, and then she had the glasses in her hands.

"What's the big deal? There's nothi—"

"Just _fuck off_, alright?" I snarled. I grabbed the glasses from her slackening fingers before they fell and jammed them back over my eyes. My throat felt so dry and empty I was sure it was going to implode on me.

"What… I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—"

I wanted to say: Are you fucking happy now?

But what came out was: "It's fine. Whatever."

Last night I couldn't sleep again, so I decided to systematically rid myself of the little tidbits of childhood that Dooley inserted into my life. I took all the pictures and the natty old duvet and the bedroom slippers and the miniature broomstick and the chipped coffee mug with all my quills still in it and in my head I yelled: Good riddance to the bloody lot of you! I put everything in a little pile and denuded one of my pillows of its satin covering and stuck everything in there. The moon looked like white paper in the velvet screen of the night sky, and I thought it was a good night to take a walk, so I went out hefting my childhood in a pillowcase. I dumped it in someone's herb garden.

Then I went out and got drunk enough to start blabbing to a complete stranger about Granger, and the bloke asked me why I haven't fucked her already, and that made me angry so I hit him. And then he hit me back. Cause and effect.

The point was that I hardly got any sleep, and my insomnia was back to crawl over everything leaving behind its artificial anemic epidermis, and this morning I looked into the mirror and my face was all fucked up again. I wasn't sure if it was all in my head or not. Hence the last minute decision to wear my spare glasses supplemented with your average entry-level Glamour Charm.

"I don't understand… Why are you so angry?"

"I'm not _angry_, alright? I just… I slipped in the shower."

The look she gave me was dripping with disbelief.

There was a poem I heard once. Something, something, shut my eyes and the world drops dead. Something, something, I lift my lids and all is born again.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

And then she smiled at me, a conspiratorial little smile like she was in on my big, bad secret. And maybe she was. And maybe I didn't mind.

"Liar," she said in a low voice.

Ba-dum-dum-dum went my pushover heart.

"Prove it."

"That's not very nice." Her voice was breathy in a way I'd never heard before, her lips a pouty little pink moue.

"What's not nice?"

"If this is some sort of sneaky Slytherin attempt to get me to imagine what you look like in the shower… Well, it worked." She'd painted her nails electric blue. They were all chipped and torn up at the edges, and I wondered if she gnawed on them like she used to at school.

Ba-dump.

"Well… Good." I could have punched myself.

Her fingers were warm and white against my wrist. When did she get so close?

"Draco… You don't have to hide them, you know. Your scars. Not from me. I… We all have them."

"What… What scars?"

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

"I mean… The ones on your face. They've always been—" Her mouth crumpled into a frown, and it made me want to hold her hand and exclaim that I would support her every endeavor until the day I died. Her eyes didn't leave her hands, and I knew that withholding eye contact wasn't her style. I wondered when I began recognizing her habits, what point in time she stopped being a stranger to me. She bit her lip and forced out a smile and finally met my gaze. Something poignant in that small action ground me to my seat. "You know what, never mind. I didn't mean to pry. I'm sorry."

The pressure of the moment caved into itself, and we were back in the waiting room. Pressure was a funny thing. 14.7 pounds per square inch of air bearing down on our bodies, and yet we don't notice it. Not until it's gone, anyway. And there's nothing at all left to hold your seams stitched together.

(Darling, darling, let me be your drizzle.)

"You know… You don't smell like blackberries anymore."

"Dooley was being clingy. I told her to stop coming."

I threw the blackberry sedative into the herb garden along with the detritus of my past. I was getting bad again. Sorry, Wallace.

It was getting harder and harder to keep reminding myself that Granger was no miracle, and that I was no saint, and it would never ever work. Her brain-dead husband was vegetating somewhere within the same building. I had no leg to stand on. We were just two crazy kids who found each other while waiting for the world to rearrange itself in conformation to the laws of gravity. Two half-hewn unfinished fluxions of chemistry and instinct, trapped in a state of quantum entanglement. I felt a sprawling sense of ill-usage, but my lips could form no accusation. Not against her. It wasn't her fault, after all. I was nothing to her but a convenient shock absorber.

(Darling, you can be my hurricane.)

"Shame. I like blackberries."

She slipped her fingers off my wrist. It's a funny thing, pressure. You don't notice it until it's gone. Her eyes were stones. Muddy, muddy, glimmering stones.

Cold and brown and dappled with golden shadows. Like looking at the sun through a drippy window.

"So get yourself some blackberries. Stop sniffing me like some kind of mental patient."

All that stood between her and the atomic meltdown in my ribcage was my chest wall, and I hoped she didn't notice the beating raging branding iron bonfire of my heartbeat.

She gave me a playful shove and I smiled.

Go on. Move along. Nothing to see here.

* * *

**Week 56**

"What happened on the night of the 27th of December?"

Wallace, you depraved, grubby little capitalist. You brown-nosing, myopic eunuch. I hate you.

All I want is a bit of catharsis.

Must you be so selfish?

I _hate_ you.

"I'm _not_ crazy."

"No, of course you aren't."

He looked at me and I looked at him. This was our little game. My denial, followed by his complicit acquiescence. It helped keep me calm. Usually, anyway. I don't think it was working now, though. I felt wasted and faded and antsy and angry and I wanted to feel the cartilage in his nose crumple under my fist.

Must be the insomnia.

Or the caffeine.

"Don't… Don't _say_ it like that, like…"

"Like what, Mister Malfoy?"

"Like… Like… Never mind."

"What happened on the night of the 27th of December?"

Maybe I shouldn't have got rid of that sedative.

Maybe they sedated me not to make it easier for them to handle me, but to make it easier for me to handle myself.

"You know what happened?" I said, forcing myself to breathe out slowly. I felt the truth—or some semblance of it—hammering blindly and violently in my brain, stretching my meningeal envelope with its seeking fingers.

"My best friend died on that day. That's what happened. He just up and dissolved himself from the face of the Earth. One thing led to another, I suppose. But it's never just one thing, is it? It's a multitude of things. It's a billion decisions and twice as many consequences. It's like little streams all flowing into each other, coalescing into larger and larger bodies and eventually running into the sea. Maybe that's why people go crazy."

Cause and effect.

Outside, the sky was strange and flat, the sun faking the daylight. It was like looking at the universe from inside a big, dusty dome.

"Why do people go crazy?"

"Because everything that's important is all so temporary. Because we live everything as it comes—without warning, without rehearsal. Because a world of infinite cause and effect is a world where nothing is condemnable. Because in the grand scheme of things nothing really means anything. And I know that all this shouldn't hurt me so I don't understand why it's like… like I have a special receptor for it."

"A special receptor for what?"

"You know how pain is a signaling system for your body to tell your brain that something is damaged? Well, I think my signaling system is all fucked up. Maybe it's in my spinal cord. Or my medulla. Whatever the hell it is, I feel things too much. I'm… I'm a human-shaped pain receptacle. And it's not fair because there's enough pain to go around, but everyone else's nerves have calcified. They just don't… They don't _see_ any of it. We went through two wars, for fuck's sake. It's like I'm surrounded by… by trees. By suicide trees. All stiff and wooden and impassive."

I imagined a pocket of empty colour. Flickering festoons of run-for-your-life orange and delirious green and supernova blue licking sinuously at each other in a forgotten corner of space and time. That was me. Maco Dralfoy, the black hole.

"I see… What happened on the night of the 27th of December?"

"People who think that everything has a reason are fools. Sad, sad little fools."

"Mister Malfoy, do you remember what happened?"

"I tried to fix it."

"Fix what?"

"My pain receptors."

* * *

**Week 60**

At the Battle of Hogwarts, the floor buckled beneath my feet, then my knees jammed up on me, then I skidded to the ground, and I was lost.

There are a lot of things we take for granted simply because they're always there. Like pressure. And air. And love and hope and light and illusion and all that crap.

The floor too.

You don't really think about how much faith you put into the floor beneath your feet until it starts to cave in.

It was, overall, a rather romantic scene. Milk-and-water mist. Everything a watercolor wash of angry greys and sinister greens held captive in the sly advance of dusk. The sounds of battle that really were more feeling than anything audible. The awareness that someone somewhere in the castle was right now breathing their death rattle. The world all around me smeared by high velocity.

The floor rumbled aggressively under my stomach as if for my edification.

See this here?

It's called gravity.

Now, we call it the _Theory_ of Gravitation, but it doesn't seem so theoretical now, does it?

I remembered thinking that I just wanted to lie there forever until the heartbeat pulsing viciously in my eardrums started to feel normal while everyone went off to die meaningful deaths in the candy-flash death-parade that was Hogwarts besieged, and that they all thought I was a coward anyway, and I might as well save my skin while I was at it. It comforted me to know that I had fallen and could fall no further.

And I was lying there, the floor pressing so intimately against my cheek that I could taste it in my mouth, when Crabbe grabbed a handful of the back of my robes and hauled my to my feet. I shoved him away. Then there was a spell that lit up the corridor in a sickly green flash lurid and blunt as high noon, and the bling of it got caught in his eye, and the look I found there made me shiver.

He said: Get yourself together, you fucking shit dick.

Goyle was standing behind him looking like a gigantic, terrified baby. His face was sheened with sweat and blackened with soot. It was at that moment that I decided that I hated Voldemort, but by then it was too late.

And then, not five minutes later, Crabbe was dead. But everyone knows that story already.

Move on, they said.

That was the big mantra of the year.

Did you take part in the war?

Move on.

Did your family lose everything it once held dear?

Move on.

Are your friends all dead?

Move on.

And I _would_ be moving on too, if my brain didn't insist on puking up the past every bloody time I went to bed.

Goyle's dead too, right?

Right.

Of course.

What was I thinking?

Crabbe is dead. Goyle is also dead.

And I…

I was left behind lying with the floor quaking beneath my stomach, just like I wanted.

(I am the heir to white gold decay.)

When both your friends die in a fire, it gets really hard to tell who is who.

(I am a fucking coward.)

Move on.

I woke up this morning with a big dry feathery crack attached to my neck instead of a face.

I felt for it slowly with my fingertips.

Yeah, my face was still there.

My skin was dry, though. Like a capital, top-shelf case of sunburn. My fingertips came into contact with the stinging rawness of newly-healed skin. I would have checked the mirror, but Maco Dralfoy was starting to get on my nerves with his stupid pale eyes and his thin wry little mouth.

Then I had a funny thought. I thought: this is how it starts. Little dry papery folds here and there that criss-cross their way across your face. You don't notice them at first. They take advantage of your leniency and pretend like they aren't there to stay, that they're only sleeping over for the night because they're in town and your face was so conveniently spacious. You weren't using all that extra skin anyway, were you? And your eyes have just the right amount of sheen and your cheeks so blank and empty so they invite their corrugated cousins and their pleated pals and before you know it your face is rumpled and puckered and tucked and you've forgot how to smile. Then it spreads out until it eats you, and you are just one big wrinkle.

(Like death grown over with bark.)

One big, sad wrinkle in the fabric of space and time.

That's what I am.

(We'll never get away. And even if we could—even if we could—)

A sad scar-stippled little wanker who could no longer tell the difference between what was real and what was only pretending to be.

* * *

**Week 62**

"So a guy's wife gets into a terrible car accident."

"Excuse me?"

"It's a joke I heard from George. George Weasley. Listen."

"Do I have a choice?" My lips formed themselves into a smile before I could help it. So I liked her jokes. So what?

"Well, there's this terrible car accident—you _do_ know what a car is, don't you?"

"Yeah, sure, go on."

"And the driver is injured and has to go to hospital—hospital's basically St. Mungo's for Muggl—"

"I know what bloody hospital is."

"O-_kay_, sorry. Just making sure. Anyway, he goes to hospital and speaks with the doctor. A doctor is a Heale—"

She cut herself off when I glared at her.

"Alright. I get it, you know what a doctor is. Well, the guy goes to speak with the doctor."

"And…"

"And the doctor says, 'I'm sorry Mister Jones, I'm afraid we have nothing but bad news. Your wife survived the crash but she's in a coma and there's no telling when she'll wake up. Even if she does regain consciousness, she will most likely be a borderline vegetable for the remainder of her life. Your insurance declined coverage, and we can only keep her here for another couple of days. She will require expensive machinery and full time care to keep her alive. You may want to look into hiring a live-in nurse, or perhaps quit your job to become your wife's caretaker. You ought to consider selling your house to afford her care. After that, I'm not sure what to tell you.' Meanwhile, the husband is distraught. He asks the doctor, 'Are you sure about all of this?' And the doctor says… the doctor says…"

At this point Granger was having a right hard time controlling her laughter. I wasn't sure what was so funny, but the sight of her biting her lip around a guffaw in a valiant effort to deliver her punch line made my own mouth twitch. She had a laugh like wind chimes, or glass chips, and I drank the sound in like I was a man buried alive, and she was my coup de grace.

"Get on with it, Granger."

"The doctor slaps him on the back and says… 'Nah, mate. I'm only messing with you. She's dead.'"

The Mediwitch gave us a stern squinting as Granger's laughter pealed across the waiting room.

"I'm not sure it's healthy for you to be making such morbid jokes," I grinned at her. She shrugged.

"Healthy shmealthy. Learn to live a little, you fusty old man."

She had all the wrong reactions to things, and maybe it wasn't such a bad thing. At least I was sure she wasn't just some passive, programmed creature. She was alive. And real. I was starting to get worried. Because here she was: Solid, burnout Granger with her sickly sense of humour and her hair and her aesthetic philosophical ramblings, and I knew without doubt or pretense that she was the most real thing I've encountered in a long, long time.

What the hell did that say about me?

Cross your fingers, lads. Hold onto your hats. Right here, right now, is your last chance to feel human.

"Hey, Draco, do you want to… maybe…"

"Yeah?" I looked up too quickly for my brain to catch up with my movements.

"I don't know, it's silly. But maybe if sometime you're not busy, we could—"

"Granger, Hermione." The Mediwitch's voice had a way of cutting through your reality like a great big sobering blade.

I looked at Granger. She looked at me. Her cheeks were pink. She gave me a wan smile.

I'll have whatever Live Wire Granger over here is having, bartender. Get me a fix of some of that vicious hypnosis.

"Sorry. I guess I'll see you later, Draco."

"Yeah."

(You and me, baby, we're like entropy.)

It was Granger, Hermione.

(Spontaneous combustion in a sealed chamber.)

And then Jones, Mallory.

(Stars dying an ecstatic death.)

And then Jackman, Wayne.

(Perpetual motion machines breeding rust in our gaskets.)

And then Malfoy, Draco.

(Darling, you're beautiful.)

Jones had lost a lot of his paunch and was now done with the juice fast. He wasn't allowed to eat solids yet, though. He ate mashed bananas, protein shakes, and other such half-masticated looking fare. You get your stomach used to liquids, and the moment you re-introduce something substantial it turns inside out on you. Jackman lost the anarchist air. He was on his way to recovery, I've heard. He was more wet blanket than live wire now. He was healed.

* * *

**Week 65**

Wait!

No, no.

Stop!

That was what I wanted to say, but somehow the words never left my mouth. They got stuck there somewhere on the tortuous path between my frontal lobe and my palpitating tongue. Maybe the letters got tangled up with my optic nerve and they dangled there, right behind my eyeballs. It certainly felt like it. I had a raging headache. I thought longingly of the cool white sheets and dappled purpling shadows of my room back home.

Mrs Crabbe looked at me funny and I started, noticing for the first time that I had my hand half stretched out and that my mouth was skewed around a gimpy little grimace. I looked around, taking inventory of my universe—who I am, where I was, what was happening. I remembered. I put my hand back down. I clenched my jaw and tried to concentrate on the pressure at the back of my teeth instead of the angry thump, thump, thumping of blood at my temple.

Wait!

Stop that!

Bring him back up!

No one deserves to be shut up under six feet of clod.

I am the artificial byproduct of the stinking morass of your soul. I am God's lazy eye. I am a worm farm.

For fuck's sake.

I thought it should have been raining. In my mind the weather was very different. It was supposed to be grey and wet—all steely sharp solemnity, the air humid with tears pretending to be unshed. In my mind the rain would slam down on us from a low sky, and I would stand there by his tombstone—a solitary black figure in all that misted gloom, my hair plastered to my scalp with rainwater—and I would maybe kneel, or maybe just bow my head. A bundle of morose, shadowy clouds hanging over the middle distance. The subterranean rumble of approaching thunder. The sweetish, earthy scent of spreading damp getting in my throat.

But instead the sun was crackling along happily like nothing happened. The air was so fucking crisp it wasn't even funny. No one was crying. No one bowing. The ground was wet though, which I couldn't understand at all. It was like it was trying to compensate for the obdurately inappropriate cheeriness of the sky. It was a cold, cold January morning, and nothing felt right.

I'd heard my parents discussing the fact that Mr and Mrs Crabbe didn't want me or Goyle there. Obviously they couldn't say no to my father. Small mercies, I guess. Or not.

So there I stood, squelching the wet mud beneath my ridiculously shiny black shoes and wondering what it was we thought we were burying. I heard there was nothing left of him but molars, but that's not true. I knew. I was there. There were bones, too. Bits of charred might-have-beens. Flakes of desiccated probably-will-not-bes.

I itched in my dress robes. You'd think that with a lifestyle like mine, I ought to have been used to the silky suffocating drag of brocade already, but no. Overhead, the sun was a flash of buttery gold. I wondered if it were possible to Apparate into space. Across interstellar distances. Theoretically, it should be possible. I wondered what Crabbe would have thought of it. He was a surprisingly thoughtful fellow, once you got to know him, but he was the sort to get caught up in mundane little technicalities.

Like: Oh, but why would you even want to do that?

Or: You can't breathe in space, Draco.

Or: You could, but you'd probably splinch yourself horribly.

I had a sudden image of Crabbe, toothless and confused, floating around in empty space. He'd tried to Apparate to the sun, splinching himself right across the gums, and so he'd left his molars behind for us to bury. I couldn't help it. I laughed. It sounded like something flayed and canned and slipped in furtively through the gap underneath the door from another room. Mrs Crabbe flashed me a dirty, dirty look like she would have liked nothing more than to blow out my guts through my spine with a quick and nasty Entrail-Expelling Curse. I felt my father's hard-knuckled hand tighten around my shoulder. Goyle dug his elbow into my ribs. My throat corroded with bile, and I wanted to hurl all over my mud-shined shoes.

"Shut up, Malfoy," Goyle whispered into my ear. He looked like a puppet in his robes. We all did. Like automatons programmed to leak salty water out of our seeing holes whenever unfortunate things happened and then, when enough time for polite grief has passed, to move on.

_Psychotic breakdowns are so last season_, a voice that sounded remarkably like Pansy's simpered in my head. Pansy wasn't at the funeral. She said it was my fault. She called me a self-absorbed motherfucking shit heel waste of space. She said it in that lilting intonation she uses whenever she's boiling angry: Mo-_ther_-fu-_cker_! She said she never wanted to see me again. I sucked my tongue off the back of my teeth and counted to ten in my head. Every number marked another second of my life that I would never get back.

Move on. Move on. Move on.

I thought of light and heat and phosphorescence. Of how something can be so hot that it starts to emit a radioactive glow, like the aftermath of an atom bomb. Of dry heaving desperation and the sensation of your insides turning slowly into powder. Too-tight skin and aching bones and heat, heat, heat.

* * *

**Week 66**

When I was around Granger I didn't think so much of trees.

The trees around the Manor were static and unmoving and dead dead dead like so many self-murderers condemned to a half-life of arrested momentum. So much around me was cracked bereft of life. So much. The first war blew its icy acid breath across Wizarding England and left it blasted and traumatized and weak-kneed. The second war finished the job. With all the talk about 'recovery' and 'rebuilding' and 'renewing' and the medals and awards and honours flung about like confetti you'd think it never happened.

Granger was... different. She wasn't special or extraordinary. Nothing about her was beatific or sublime. She was just... different. I didn't get her, but I knew that I was wrong about her.

She looked her best in bright, bright daylight. Almost like the sun was especially crafted for the sole purpose of getting caught in the twisted depths of her hair. In the sunlight, she was copper and flame and softly pink fingertips. Like the rust corroding a twisted metal joint. Like an old Knut.

"Do you ever think about... About what your life would have been like, if none of this ever happened?" She was holding the coffee mug with both hands like a child.

"It's marvelous how you can read and talk at the same time."

"I'm not reading anything, see?"

"Hmm."

"Draco."

"Huh."

"Draco."

"_What_?"

"Answer my question. Do you think... if we didn't play the parts we did in the war... Do you ever wonder what we would have been like? Sometimes... Sometimes I'm afraid that the only reason I'm brave and kind is because I was forced to grow up in the circumstances we inherited."

(Fall apart with me, Granger.)

"That's stupid."

She glared at me. I sighed and turned my full attention on her. "You're not just a product of your generation. You're... you. You're Hermione Granger."

(Tell me something that makes you cry, Granger.)

"But what if you're wrong? What if the only reason we are who we are is because of some bizarre coincidental alignment of events—"

"Look, why are you here anyway?"

"That's... a pretty loaded question."

"Oh, shut up. I mean why are you _here_, in the waiting room?"

"Hmm... I guess... You know how money was your crutch? Oh, don't make that face, we all know it's true. Well, money was your crutch, and logic was mine. And I couldn't take it as soon as I realized that things don't always happen in a way that makes sense."

I squinted my eyes and tried to look at her like I was a searchlight, and she was an errant convict. I wasn't really sure what I was doing. "No, no," I said, shaking my head, "Why are you _really_ here?"

She swallowed. I thought her eyes were starting to water, but it was just a trick of the light. "Because... Because I lost my husband."

"You're here because you were damaged by the war. We all were. You're here because you want to fix the hole it left behind. Because you know that there's something worth salvaging there, alright?"

"Sometimes I think if I weren't friends with Harry I probably would have fled Wizarding England altogether. Given up my wand. Run for the hills."

"Oh, bullshit. Bull. _Shit_. You know as well as I do that that's what all of us would have done. Yes, including Saint Potter. I would probably have been sipping tea somewhere if my family weren't involved. Screw upholding my heritage. It's only human. Weren't you the one preaching to me about beauty and all that crap?"

"I suppose..."

"Alright, let's put it this way. In Muggle Studies I learned that all our molecules come from the stars. That all the heavier elements in the universe were forged in the bowels of a fucking supernova. Somehow, from all that chaos, organic matter came about and here we are now, waging wars and having juice fasts and getting therapy. Just because it came about from coincidence doesn't mean it's any less profound. Or any less real."

I hardly knew if I believed any of the words that came out of my mouth. All I knew was that it was more important to me at that moment that _she_ believed it. Because she was Live Wire Granger, and I knew without a doubt that if the world were to snuff her out, then I might as well...

I might as well...

"That was beautiful," she said in deadpan, rolling her eyes. I wanted to shake her. Or kiss her. Whichever.

(Be my lover, Granger.)

I felt on the verge of a glorious epiphany, and I wasn't sure if I wanted it to peak. Epiphanies can be bloody scary. So I backed down and let my cresting excitement melt along the slope of my shoulders.

In the sunlight, she was milk-and-honey bioluminescence. She was sour cherries, and dew-painted mockeries, and a vertigo so deep-seated I felt it all the way down to every vein and every artery. She was a pulsing neutron star, and I wanted in on her gravity.

_Jesus_. I could spend the rest of my life trying to forget this girl.

"Don't... Don't let them take it away from you, Granger. Somewhere under all that hair and among all that stellar leftover gunk is something worth saving."

"Are you talking about my... my _soul_? Ha. Very funny." She tapped her foot impatiently and I wondered if she had somewhere else to be. "You know, I don't get you. You're the most irreverent, most cynical, most naive little boy I've ever met. None of those things should work together."

(My lovely lady river.)

"Whatever."

It was her turn to squint. She crossed her arms and gave me _that_ look. It was my turn to be the criminal. "What about yours?"

"Excuse me?"

"You almost had me falling for that, Draco. What about _your_ soul? Do you think it's worth saving?"

"Last time I checked, we were talking about _you_. Don't turn this around on me."

"Well, alright. As long as you acknowledge that all you just said applies to you too," she said carefully, nodding. "You know, I wasn't really serious when I said you'd be a creme brulee-flavoured bean, but now I see it fits you perfectly. You're just a hard shell with a creamy, creamy center aren't you? Oh, come on, don't look away. Let me see those pretty baby greys."

"This conversation got real sappy real quick. Can we stop?"

"I'm sorry, are you embarrassed?" She giggled. "If it makes you feel any better, when I was little I used to think fellatio was a type of pasta."

I snorted.

"You're an idiot."

"You really do have beautiful eyes, you know."

I wanted to say: Granger, I will leave my eyes with you when I die. You can have them. You can scoop them right out of my skull and keep them in a little glass box.

(Ever wonder if it's all for you, Granger?)

She graced me with a smile that was pure warmth and I knew that despite her waxy pallor, the slump to her shoulders, and the sense of doom that was palpable in the air around her, she was the lingering ghost of all we had lost during the war.

I am Draco Malfoy, the stellar remnant. I am the used rags of my ancestry, a defective brain, fruit of chance, hair after my father's side of the family, nose glued together from a few dead noses from my mother's side. She is Hermione Granger, byproduct of dead, defective stars. Maybe we were perfect for each other after all. Maybe I ought to ask her out.

"How long do you have to keep coming here?" she asked me.

(Forever. Forever. Get me out of here, will you?)

"I don't know. Wallace said I'm halfway out already. It shouldn't be too long. What about you?"

Her chin trembled, but then she bit down and laughed. I was confused. "This is my last day. I wish I could... But I can't. I can't come back here. It's unhealthy."

(Let me build castles for you, Granger.)

"Oh," I said.

"Granger, Hermione." The Mediwitch was prompt. So prompt. So fucking prompt.

And then it would be Jones, Mallory.

Then Jackman, Wayne.

Then Malfoy, Draco.

How are you, Draco? Are you still seeing the trees everywhere? Are you smelling colours and hearing lights and tasting last breaths and squeezing death rattles between your fingers, Draco? Are you still stuck in the past, Draco? Why can't you move on? Do you still see Goyle in your dreams? Are you still thinking of parallel dimensions and alien impostors?

What happened on the 27th of December, Draco?

Are you still trying to kill yourself?

"—ou're not nearly as tragic as you make yourself out to be, Malfoy," Granger tutted sagely, standing from her seat and smoothing her skirt. "You'll be fine."

"Huh?"

(Let's run away.)

She frowned, and again her chin trembled. The lines of her jaw were graceful, and I wanted to run my knuckle down its tapered slope. She made to touch my arm, but she drew her fingers back at the last second.

"Draco... Please. Please, Draco. Don't make this harder for me. I can't... It's been a pleasure getting to know more about you. And I'm sorry, but I can't ever see you again."

(We could take a train that goes Eastward forever and ever. Follow the dawn's grey and gold gossamer trail.)

"You're... You're healed, aren't you?" I said dumbly. I wanted to go now. I wanted awareness to sink into the silence of the unused lobes of my brain.

"What?"

The Mediwitch tutted loudly.

"You're better now, so you can't see me anymore. That's it, isn't it? You're _moving on_."

I watched her face as she took in what I said. To my surprise, she looked almost angry. "No. _No_. That's not it at a—"

"_Don't you see, Malfoy? There is symmetry in life. We all live according to a symmetrical composition._ Yeah, you are so full of shit." I was on my feet and in her face before I even realized what I was doing. In my head I was shouting, but my voice came out as a bitter, angry whisper. The Mediwitch made a move forward, but Granger signaled her to stop.

"You are such a Goddamn _hypocrite_. It's so easy to waffle about beauty and symmetry and balance when you aren't a fucking basket case, isn't it? Tell me, do you get off on preaching from your pure pedesta—"

"Shut up, Malfoy. Shut _up_. You think I'm okay? Draco, the world is not made up of either-or dichotomies. Just because someone seems happy doesn't mean he can't feel pain."

She was whispering too, rapidly and with quick, staccato rhythm. Then I thought: maybe she doesn't want to wake her husband. I almost laughed. It wasn't amusement I felt, but something cold, and trenchant, and painfully anonymous. It must have shown on my face. She curled her top lip around a sneer that didn't quite reach her eyes.

"And just because someone's in pain doesn't mean he can't ever be happy again."

Her words knocked the wind right out of me like a roundhouse to my diaphragm. I sat down. I heard a voice speaking. It sounded like mine. "I thought you were... I thought you were like me. I thought you were broken. But you're not. You're perfectly fine. You'll pick yourself up and move on. Just like the rest of them."

(I see the sky in you, Granger.)

She ducked her head and placed a finger to her temple. The mass of her hair tipped forward along her shoulders, and I caught the faintest tinge of lemon.

"You know how..." she hesitated, and I thought she was going to stop talking right then and there. But then again, she was never one to mince words. "You know how they say you can only love someone else if you love yourself first? Well, it's... kind of like that. I'm just as fucked up as you are, Draco. We'd be horrible together. _Horrible_." She made a face to compound her point. My head was a dead weight dangling from my neck. The lighting was doing that funny glowy thing to her hair again.

In the sunlight she was...

She was...

She was a fucking angel.

"Who said anything about love?"

She shook her head. "Everyone has his own scrap of the universe to keep, Draco. You just have to find yours."

I felt a pressure against my hands, and I realized that she was handing me back my traveller's mug. It was half-empty. Half-full. Whatever.

"Thanks for bringing me coffee. I'm sorry. I meant to tell you earlier, but I... It just never came up."

(I hear the sea in you, Granger.)

My scrap of universe was a flat that was barely anything more than four bare walls surrounding a vacuum of inertia. It wasn't enough. I felt anxiety clamp around my ribcage.

"Miss Granger, come along please. Healer Smith is waiting."

"You don't need my permission to get better, Granger."

She smiled her honeysuckle sun-drenched smile at me. Her coup de grace smile. Her tough-as-nails, deaf-as-granite, chipped concrete smile. They all said she was tough. That she was made of metal. They were wrong. She was made of glass, Granger was. She's the type to break you even as you break her. I wanted to grab her and hold her and see if my breath would leave its pattern across her skin.

"See you on the other side, Malfoy."

Exit Granger, stage right.

"Okay," I replied, nodding dumbly.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

That was my last word to Hermione Granger. To the fucking light that made the air breathable in my little scrap of universe. To my pretty little left-behind Knut.

Here in the waiting room my pacing desperation was just another symptom, and I was just another crazy fellow who tried to off himself.

My lungs expanded with the utter validity of my personal catastrophe. With the truth. What is this word, truth? The truth doesn't set you free; all of that was bollocks that was said by someone who's never really found it. The truth leaves you with gaping wounds and it hurts like three-inch nails in your feet, like water flooding your nostrils, like cigarette burns to your insides, melted asphalt running through your unyielding veins.

The truth can gash you so deeply that you can't live with the wounds any longer, and after the war, most of us, even though we will never admit it, wanted only to live.

As painlessly as possible.

It's only human.

I am Maco Dralfoy, the misplaced quasar. I am the starry-eyed idealist trapped on a sinking ship. I am the queasy-stomached stockpiler of broken hearts. What could Granger possibly want with me?

In my head, I heard the rustling of a thousand trees.

* * *

**Week 68**

"I'm tired, Wallace. I'm tired of... all of this. What are we trying to accomplish?"

"We are trying to heal you, Mister Malfoy."

"I can't... I don't..."

"You are worth it."

"Huh."

"Mister Malfoy, have you read the letter yet? Have you looked at it at all?"

"No. I don't want to. You can't make me."

"You may read it now, if you wish. I give you my permission."

"Like I'm touching that. I'm going to toss it in the fireplace first thing when I get home."

Wallace looked at me with a wry twist to his flaccid mouth. Outside, the sky was one long nicotine smear. "Are you going to burn it, then?"

"Fuck off."

* * *

**Week ?**

There is that space in time that I like to occupy. It's small and fleeting, and if you look too hard, you will lose it altogether.

It's that stretch of seconds between a thought and a word, the silence that predicates a contraction of muscle against bone. It's a pretty little capsule of frozen time when your mind is blissfully blank. It is getting a glass of water and being entranced by the stream of clear sparkle pouring from the spigot, or scratching the back of your neck, or staring out the window at various moving nothings, or making indeterminate, never-to-be-fulfilled plans to skip town. It's a century crammed into a heartbeat, when life decides that you deserve a breather.

On my bed was the envelope from Wallace. I made a small slit in it, but it lay there, closed and inert and unmoving like someone's pale, discarded, amputated hand.

I've heard of bombs. Of radiation. Of cells bursting outwards forever and ever.

I've heard of cyanide. I've heard of carbon monoxide. I've heard of butane and pesticides and olanzapine. Potassium chloride. Hydrogen sulfide. Lye.

You could pour a hundred to two hundred milliliters of chloroform into a washcloth and slap it over your nose and mouth and Spellotape it there so it doesn't fall off when you become unconscious.

You could down over thirty grams of aspirin and wash it into your stomach with antihistamines and vodka. The antihistamines are to prevent the aspirin from splattering onto the bathroom floor in a rainbow cascade of sick. The vodka... Well. The vodka is for coping.

I've heard of sodium phenobarbital. I've heard of electric shock. I've heard of overdosing.

You could jump off the top of the Ministry.

You could get yourself trampled by the Hogwarts Express, your bones getting caught in its spokes.

You could get yourself a handful of sleeping pills and just... get dirty with it.

I've heard of these substances called chemicals. The Muggles invented them. Some are harmless, some are toxic. Everything in the world is made of some combination or other of chemicals. Sometimes, if you mix certain chemicals together, exciting things would happen. Three in particular: potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. Together they make a listless grey chalky kind of powder. Innocuous enough stuff. But touch it with fire, and it turns violently into gas. The Muggles managed to harvest this rapid combustion. If you somehow direct all this expanding pressure in one direction, you have a weapon. Muggles figured out that they can use this gas expansion to blow projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles are fast enough that they make nothing of flesh, sinew, meat and bone. I've heard of guns and gunpowder.

I think this is similar to how people get crazy. My head was full. It was full of things that people put in there, and those things don't fit at all together. They are artificial, useless, hideous. I was malfunctioning, my brain fertile ground for neuroses aplenty. I was a lunatic, and I needed an outlet for all that incipient lunacy roiling in my head.

Who bound us together, me and my body? Why should I die together with it? Why should I be subject to my imbalanced chemicals? Why shouldn't I have the right to prod and poke at myself until I knew where the borderline between us is drawn?

One day you are thinking and hauling yourself all over the place, and the next you are cold plant food. It's so easy to make a ghost.

Look at Crabbe.

Look at Goyle.

Move on, they said. Move on. I tried. I really did. I made no protest and tried to go along with the flow. I promise.

What happened on the 27th?

It was winter in the Manor. Everyone's a little crazier in the winter. When it gets that cold things start to feel a little slow, a little surreal, and you are stuck in an echo-chamber mentality while the air shifts and settles around you like a stale paradigm. There's nothing like a sterling-fresh snowfall.

In the winter the trees are silent.

Last night I dreamt of my mother and father and Crabbe and Goyle and Wallace and Mallory Jones and Wayne Jackman all sprouting leaves where their hair should be. Maco Dralfoy was there too. Maco Dralfoy was a good boy. He never sinned.

In the winter no one is who they say they are. They were trying to trap me. They were trying to get me to join their cold, sick little charade. Skin turning into bark, blood congealing into clear, unfeeling sap. Everyone was all too eager to hibernate themselves into a stupor. To move on, move on, move on. In the winter everything is shiny like the polished surface of a mirror, and I was Maco Dralfoy and Draco Malfoy was me. Maco hid my sins well. He moved on with the rest of them.

So I set him on fire.

Draco, Draco, you are no killer.

Dumbledore said that. Goyle said that too. He tried to stop me. He was always an emotional dickhead.

Sometimes I would dream of Goyle and in my dream he'd be alive. Sometimes I would dream of Goyle and in my dream he'd be looking at me like I'd just stolen something precious to him. Sometimes we'd switch places. I no longer knew who was killing who. Those were the best dreams and I hated them as much as I longed for them. They were like flying—like when you're flying away from the pitch and every second the people and the hoops and the stands get smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, only you feel it's really you that's getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all you've ever known at about a million miles an hour.

Maco was burning, burning, burning, his hair a flaxen daubing adding to the conflagration. I was on my knees crying. His lips were purpling, his body flayed outwards, the whole thing stilted and granular like an old, forgotten tragedy. But then he turned around, and I saw that it wasn't Maco Dralfoy at all. It was Goyle. Few people in this world know that Goyle was blond. They all forgot. I didn't.

Draco, Draco, you are no killer.

There is no justice, no truth, no forgiveness. No turning back. There are only shadows of you and me.

Whenever I wasn't dreaming about Goyle I was dreaming about Granger. Sometimes in the dark I wonder about her, and about how many miles of night there were between us, and if the same milky starlight puddle that wafted across my walls wafted across hers. If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

Granger no longer came to the waiting room. She told me about beauty and surviving and finding little glints of sustenance along the way, and then she left me. She was healed. She moved on.

It was alright, though. I was almost out of there too. I'm getting better. I'm always getting better, according to Wallace. I've always just turned the corner.

* * *

**Week ?**

"It's strange..."

"What is, Mister Malfoy?"

"When I think about how I'm going to stop coming here soon. I've been coming here for so long. I think I might actually miss this place. Not you, though. I won't miss you."

"Ah, indeed. Well, I shall certainly miss _you_. You are a most unique case, but more than that, you are a frighteningly insightful young man."

"It's almost... unreal."

"Draco, do you remember?"

"I think I do..."

There was no voice in my head telling me that the first step to eternal life was death. No, no voices. Maybe it would have made more sense if there were, but I have no one but myself to blame. Me and my solipsistic whimseys. Me and my creme brulee soul. I was a symptom of the times. I was the archetype of a generation set adrift by war.

All I want out of life is a bit of excitement. A bit of arbitrary ignition.

"When the fierce soul has quit the fleshly case it tore itself from, Minos sends it down to the seventh depth."

"Ah, I see you finally remember your Dante."

"Yeah. I never forgot it. Crazy blokes like me are suckers for poetry. Delusions of grandeur and all that."

"Do you remember the rest of it?"

"It falls to this wooded place, no chosen spot, but where fortune flings it in—and there it sprouts like a grain of spelt, to shoot up to a sapling, then a wild plant: and then the Harpies, feeding on the foliage, create pain, and an outlet for the pain as well."

"Draco... Are you alright? Do you need a moment?"

"I'm... fine. I've made it this far, haven't I? Like I said, everything feels just a little strange to me."

"How so?"

"I don't know. I mean... How is it even possible to tell if something is real or not? We don't have direct access to reality. The world around us is filtered through our own individual perceptions. We're all just fish in a bowl. After the war it was even harder to tell what was real from what was just pretending to be."

"Is that what drove you to depression?"

"Fuck. Of course. That, and the fact that I'd just had my whole world view turned upside down on me. I was eighteen. What do you expect? But what really got me was how quickly it ended. They killed and maimed and died themselves, but then they snapped their joints back into their sockets and patched their outsides all together. They moved on. It was like they were made of wood. Just like the trees in Dante's forest. Like suicide-souls condemned to a life of inertia."

Souls.

There is the fimbria. The fornix. The indusium griseum. The locus coeruleus. The nucleus motoris dissipatus formationis of Riley. The medulla oblongata. The corpus callosum. The substantia innominata. Somewhere in all that pulsing grey matter is my soul.

It's easy to take its existence for granted.

It's so easy to move on when your pain receptors aren't tuned to the highest possible setting.

Reality is zapping a series of nerve combinations in your brain, and getting you to respond a certain way. Reality is responding to stimuli, that's all it is.

"When I was younger I used to have panic attacks whenever I got close to trees. My mother thought it would be funny to convince me that the trees were really ghouls in disguise to keep me out of the woods back at the Manor. It worked. It got really bad at Hogwarts. That time I had to do detention with Potter in the Forbidden Forest, my parents had to take me home for a weekend to calm me down."

Wallace gave me a pseudo-sympathetic smile.

Oh, Wallace. How I would love to dissect you, cell by cell, so I could lovingly hate each part of you individually and at great leisure.

"Maybe I was too jaded. Maybe I was too hopeful. Maybe I was some weird combination of both, and that's why I couldn't take it. I thought it was a trick. They were trying to trap me in this zombie dimension. I was scared of turning into one of them. I just... I thought it was the right thing to do."

"What was the right thing to do?"

"It was winter. It was cold. I thought it would be symbolic... You know, leave a lasting impression. I left a note. That was stupid of me. I spelled it to reach Goyle at a certain time, you know, after... After I did it. I messed up the timing. He got it too early. He saw me dousing myself. He pushed me into the river."

The last thing I remembered feeling was my cheek glancing off muddy brown silty stones. The last thing I saw was Goyle. Burning.

I felt light and dizzy. The room hovered around me, the chairs and the tables withholding their weight out of sympathy.

I looked down at my arms. The skin was flushed pink and swirled, coming together at unnatural seams. Third degree burns left scars that even magic couldn't completely get rid of. It was an appropriate look, for someone who descended from the furnace of a supernova.

"I didn't want to die, Wallace. I just thought it was the only way out."

(How do you reckon I'd get my hands on Muggle petrol?)

"Congratulations, Mister Malfoy. You are cured."

"Thanks," I sneered. "No, really. It's like a fucking dream come true."

* * *

**Week ?**

Mother, the letter began.

The word 'Mother' was crossed through hastily with two angry black lines.

It was replaced with 'Goyle.'

Goyle,

You probably won't even read this. If you do read it, I'm drunk. Sorry. Half this shit won't make an ounce of sense.

You know that tree outside that window? I swear it's getting closer and closer. It uproots itself whenever I'm not looking and creeps its way toward the Manor. It's probably a good ten meters closer now than it was before. Maybe I'm having a psychotic break, I don't know. It smells funny. Like burnt hair. I smell its foliage, hear the rustling of its great big branches, I feel the second-hand wind whistling smug-faced through a forest of blue-black. I don't know what this means. I'm on my second bottle of Firewhiskey. Wish me luck. Dooley is trying to get in my door. I've warded it well.

You know how we were planning on joining the Ministry after Hogwarts? Father would have got us prime spots. Greengrass was being groomed for the Ministry too. We would have made beautiful fucking babies.

I don't know about that anymore though. I think I want to do it, but then again the thought of making another decision makes me sick to my bones. I have a lot of options, but I find each one more unpalatable than the last. I see the potential outcomes of my decisions branching out gnarled before me like the branches of that fucking tree, and it makes me want to kill myself.

Have you ever read Dante, Goyle? Of course you haven't. In one bit he talks about the wood of the suicides, how everyone who killed himself was turned into a tree forever.

Something is wrong, Goyle. Something is wrong with my family. They're all... well. That's the thing. They're _fine_. With everything that happened, they're all just _fine_. I see them walking around like nothing is wrong with the world. Like the stars aren't shooting down from the sky, or the sun isn't out of alignment. They walk around and go about their lives and it drives me 're all fish in a bloody bowl. Instinct wrapped in impotent flesh. Smoke and coloured water. It's all like one big joke that everyone's in on, but nobody gets.

Sometimes I think I made it all up inside my head.

But no.

It's a lie, Goyle. They're trying to put you under.

Everyone is stiffened into a grotesque simulacrum of life. Like dead trees. Like burnt nerves.

Goyle, I wrote this letter to warn you.

I just want to reach my fist into the core of it and pull out its still-beating heart, and I want to swallow it all. I just want to take my life and pack it up and bring it with me in a box.

You see, we're all dead in the long run. In the end we're dirt. Our whole civilization is a layer of sediment. But not me. I am heir to nothing but white gold decay. I want no part of it.

I hate it here, Goyle. I wish I weren't a Pureblood. I wish someone would come and unbuckle my wrists. Get me out.

I fought the war, but the war won.

I don't want to die, Goyle. I want to set it all on fire.

Floo me when you get this. Or maybe not. I won't be home.

Your friend,

Draco Malfoy

* * *

End Notes: So this is _kind of_ the final chapter, but not really. I have just the epilogue after this, and then it's done! Maybe we'll have a happy ending, who knows? Thanks again for reading, guys! Please let me know what you think :) As a side note, I haven't abandoned Dirt Nap Dispatches, in case anyone was wondering. I just really had to get this story off my chest first.


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